On Thu, 2009-06-18 at 11:23 -0500, Larry Stone wrote: > 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? Personally, the morning mail ritual is to clear spam and in doing this much legitimate mail often gets binned. I worked with companies where they delete everything they get in overnight. Big, well known U.K. companies. > > But it's also pointless to defer it since most mail servers will just hold > on to it and retry later. Indeed, but not wasting my bandwidth on connections, rDNS lookups and other other heads. The vast majority of out of hours connections are not legitimate and serve no use other than to totally waste resources. > The sender generally does not know that you are > not accepting mail. It's not really about that. As the use of auto-responders and bounce messages is rightfully a given 'don't', you only have the smtp error to give with what you can trust to be the original sender. It's that or just let yourself get shafted and accept the connections. Most of the breaches in security I've seen from the .hinet and .tw spammers starts overnight. Most would (at least) be delayed if you refuse the connections when you are not at work. It's not just the email handlers and staff, but those who administer the mail server it gives comfort to.
> 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. That is not really the fault of the recipient. The onus for delivery should not be with the intended recipient. > 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. If an email is *SO* desperately important and goes missing, rest assured somebody will pick up a phone. > 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. No - I don't and I have all such systems disabled. Normally the ones I hear say "Our office hours are... please call again then" and don't give you the option. It's like I say, it's not a suitable policy for everybody, but one I'm willing to try. If the sending server is genuine and set up properly, it should alert the sender using the protocol failure messages. That's why they exist. The problem Larry, and you've touched on it, is many servers are *not* set up properly and are look after people who are even more stupid than me! That, however, is *not* the fault of the recipient. It's a crazy idea in some respects, but not without merit in others. > > -- Larry Stone > lston...@stonejongleux.com
