[clue-tech] So-called "smart" hosts.

[T. Joseph Carter]

On Tue, Aug 01, 2006 at 05:38:34PM -0600, David L. Anselmi wrote:
> If you use a smart host, you trust Comcast to do what you would have 
> done, deliver it to the recipient's MX.

I used to live in Modesto, CA at one point.  At the time, the local option
was CableOne or bust.  Basically, they ran their mail servers on exchange,
and often enough mails would disappear with neither delivery to the remote
MX nor a delivery failure notice.

Additionally, I got an email from their admin telling them the 800 or so
email I was getting a day was pushing their server past the breaking
point, and they requested that I either receive less email or find another
way to get my email.

I told them if they gave me a static IP address, I'd quit bothering them
about the outbound and burdening them with my inbound mail traffic.  That
was in 1998.  I've done my own outbound mail delivery since, mostly
because I don't want to take Ben's time to configure and debug the TLS
link between miya and spock.  My inbound traffic goes to spock where I
suck it down over imaps via fetchmail on a Mac.


Is Comcast better than CableOne?  I'd hope 8 years later that CableOne is
better than Cableone.  I should say that it would be unreasonable for
Comcast to be any worse, but I also am pretty sure that if some server at
Comcast goes down and they lose 50 MB of in-transit email, affecting
probably one or two emails each for several hundred people, they probably
aren't going to feel too badly about it, nor are they going to think it is
important enough to tell me what didn't get through on the outbound, or
what the logs say about what was lost on the inbound.

They don't care.  They don't have to.  They're the cable company.  Qwest
is no better in that regard I know for a fact.


> In neither case do you have any basis for that trust.

What I have, if I deliver my own outbound, is assurance that the message
made it to the MX, at which point it's no longer my responsibility.  What
I have, given my arrangement with Ben over the use of my bluecherry
addresses, is that he will do his best to make sure no mail gets lost once
it gets to his server.  In the unlikely event that it is, I have his
assurance that he'll give me the relevant bits of Postfix logs I need to
figure out what mail I lost and to ask the sender to resend their message.

Now, it may take me as much as 18 hours to find him because bluecherry is
no longer a PA-based ISP and his day job, and the servers are just
maintained for him and about three dozen of his closest friends.  ;)