KVC@ENGVAX.SCG.HAC.COM (Kevin Carosso) (06/27/87)
> Can somebody explane to me why every, EVERY, **E V E R Y** message which I > send to INFO-VAX causes me to receive strange 'undeliverable mail' messages > from nodes I have never heard of. As someone who is both a postmaster and a developer for a mail system (I work on PMDF a bit) let me shed a little light from my perspective. > I know that the messeges I send are getting through, because I see them as > postings on INFO-VAX. But for every message posted, I get one or two > messages back from apparently automatic systems telling me that my mail was > undeliberable for various reasons. I'm sorry, but you do not "know that the messages ... are getting through". All you know is the message got to the INFO-VAX list at SRI-KL and from there wended its way back to you. From that bit of information, you certainly do NOT know whether the message made it to the other 1000 (or whatever) addresses on the list. > These 'undeliverable mail' messages come from nodes which are (as far as I > am comcerned) totally off the wall. If my mail was, in fact, not getting > through, I would apreciate knowing. I find it a pain to have to deal with > messages informing me of an untruth. What do you mean "totally off the wall"? There are an awful lot of networks out there (not systems, NETWORKS) which your mail gets forwarded to which in turn have an awful lot of systems on them. Unfortunately, this has introduced a multiplicity of naming conventions, many of which you just aren't familiar with. That makes them no less valid as potential mail recipients. If you get an error back saying your message didn't get through, then it didn't get through. Consider yourself informed of the fact. You were not "informed of an untruth". The real issue is whether you should CARE. Obviously, you don't care (mainly because you cannot do anything about the problem) if your message didn't get delivered to some fraction of INFO-VAX recipients. You would care, on the other hand, if you were sending something important to a single person. There is a range between those two cases where you no longer want to be informed. Unfortunately, most mail systems don't know where to draw that line. How are they supposed to know? So, they take the conservative tack and bounce the information (which you are free to ignore) back to you. Maybe something could be kludged into a mail system to recognize messages from a mailing list and not bounce those, but who should decide what constitutes a "mailing list"? I don't think there's a reasonable solution to this. > > Can someone explain this, or are others having the same problem? > > Dan Graham GRAHAM@DRCVAX.ARPA Everyone is having the problem. Almost everyone appreciates the fact that most mail systems do their conservative best. /Kevin Carosso kvc@engvax.scg.hac.com Hughes Aircraft Co. kvc%engvax@oberon.usc.edu