On Tue, Feb 11, 2003 at 07:46:06PM -0500, marrandy wrote:
> On Tuesday 11 February 2003 06:40 pm, you wrote:
> > I just had to uns*bscr*be 7 hotmail addresses that all seemed to be
> > bouncing together. This happens pretty frequently anyway-- hotmail must
> > have the worst servers on the planet. But these were consistently
>
> <SNIP>
>
> > Paul
>
> Paul.
>
> So how soon does this happen, timewise ?
>
> Does this mean that the NKS mail server is still broken, like when my ISP had
> server/routing problems and the nks server bounced SLUG mail after only half
> an hour and you uns*bscr*bed me.
>
> As discussed some months ago when this happened...
>
> Mail servers should not bounce mail due to networking problems, hardware
> failures at the remote end where there is NO response to either a DNS enquiry
> or No response from a mail server.
> Mail should be queued, as stated in the RFC's, for at least 4-5 days.
>
> I find it rally hard to believe that all of hotmails dns servers went
> down for
> at least 4-days.
>
> As for (quote) "This happens pretty frequently anyway". In the 6-years I
> have run mail and mailing lists, I have never seen a bounce from hotmail due
> to a DNS, mail or network problem. The only ones are authoritive as in "user
> unknown" usually a spammer faking it.
Typically what happens is this: several hotmail accounts bounce at once
on the same message. Normally, this will happen once a week or so. Note
that it does not happen with any other ISP represented on our s*bscr*ber
list. I take this to mean that Microsoft had a glitch and at the moment
the mail hit their servers, they went offline or something. Again, this
typically happens with a single message.
However in the present case, multiple addresses (the same ones) bounced
on multiple messages (ten or so, I would guess). I didn't track these
exactly, but my guess is that for a period of time, every message from
the list bounced, meaning an extended outage at hotmail. Note that all
bouncing addresses were actually s*bscr*bed to the SLUG list. The error
message on all addresses was a 5.0.0, the mailservers and DNS servers
were all different (but all on the hotmail network), and all the
mailservers were running Microsoft's SMTP software.
The phenomenon is exceptionally annoying from an admin standpoint. When
a single message bounces on a bunch of addresses at one ISP in a day, I
don't pay much attention, other than to note the ISP that's doing it
(hotmail is a consistent offender). However, when the same addresses
continue to "ring" all day, I'm no longer inclined to ignore it. So
rather than wade through this until the ISP gets it resolved, I simply
uns*bscr*be addresses. I do get occasional bounces from other
addresses/ISPs, but no single ISP bounces so many addresses so
consistently as hotmail.
It does happen from time to time that an address will go down and the
wait clock begins to run on it for a five day count. The problem with
that is this: If the ISP remains down for five days, I get a trickle of
bounces starting on the fifth day-- every email sent to that address for
five days. Worse, it's five days before I realize this has happened. So
even if I uns*bscr*be the address today, I get to wait for five more
days while the bounces all finally reflect back to me.
Since the bounces appeared to originate from hotmail and not NKS, I
would guess that Microsoft accepted the emails into their system,
determined the validity or lack of same of the addresses, and then
emitted its own bounces. A cursory check shows that hotmail hung onto
the messages for two hours or so before emitting bounces.
Paul
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