On Thu, 18 Jun 2009, Steve wrote:
I'm not so sure it's nonsense. Look at it this way if the office is
closed there is nobody there to deal with email. So it's pointless to
accept it.
How about so that it is there when the office does reopen?
But it's also pointless to defer it since most mail servers will just hold
on to it and retry later. The sender generally does not know that you are
not accepting mail. Some servers will let the sender know it's delayed
after some time but others won't. So generally the sender will not know if
the mail was delivered to your server or still sitting on their outgoing
server.
In the meantime, some server may give up on delivery and return it to the
sender as undeliverable (in the past, I've seen AOL give up after a
ridiculously short three hours). Or once you're accepting again, it may be
a long time before the server tries again. Or an outage prevents retry.
E-mail is not intended to be an immediate medium. It is store-and-forward
by design. While I appreciate quick responses, I do not expect them.
Meanwhile, the system gets the mail as close to the recipient as possible.
So I assume you don't use answering machines either. After all, if there's
no one there to immediately answer the call, it's pointless to take a
message.
-- Larry Stone
lston...@stonejongleux.com
