3 ms·
Back in the day when the RFC was written it was common for people to run their own mail servers and have them be offline for a day or two, so it was a better ex
by jedberg 5y ago
Back in the day when the RFC was written it was common for people to run their own mail servers and have them be offline for a day or two, so it was a better experience for the sender to have retries for days.
Nowadays it's assumed that the mail server is set up for high availability on good networks so it's a better experience for the sender to know right away that it wasn't deliverable so that they can use another communication channel for semi-urgent messages.
The ideal situation would be for the sender to get a retry warning while still retrying (which is they way it used to be done), but I can see why Yahoo might not want to tie up their resources that way.
- inopinatus 5y agoAgreed. Fail fast is now the more desirable outcome, particularly for consumer messaging. Moreover it is just inside the boundary of the RFC. The standard does not explicitly reject a zero number of retries, nor does it insist on the failure window; the language is noncommittal, and for an RFC that is significant and can only be interpreted as intentional.
- beezle 5y agoI have to disagree here. The standard in the past has been "we tried to deliver the message but were unable, we will continue trying until XXX" where XXX was measured in a few days. Getting the above message is sufficient to allow the use of other messages for something that is time critical. Instead, Yahoo is bailing out completely after just three hours.