On Thu, 8 May 1997 13:45:54 -0400 Brad Knowles said:
>
>>                I see that Matt Korn is still your VP of Operations, so it
>> looks like I may be preaching to  the choir :-)
>
>    He keeps remarking on occasion how much mail could be handled by
>VM SMTP, but he's changed his tune a bit since we found a bug in that
>code with regards to the way it handles MX RRs.  Especially since
>we were forced to work that out the hard way, as no one at IBM
>was willing to work directly with us, and the IBM customers they
>were willing to work with didn't have enough information about the
>problem to describe it sufficiently well.

Funny, I remember IBM very willing to work on the problem.  The
difficulty was getting information from AOL about what changed.

>
>    After we'd sufficiently "black-boxed" the thing, and worked with
>these customers applying multiple rounds of "Okay, we've installed
>this patch to our mainframe, does it work now?  No....", we finally
>got that one worked out.

Actually, that problem saved us a little this time.  In order
to work on that, we had LMAIL send all AOL traffic to a separate
VM SMTP server, and given the quirkyness of AOL's mail, we just
left it that way.  When we started getting the bounces, we shutdown
that server, and let the mail queue up while we worked out a
circumvention.

>
>
>    We've also pointed out to him how expensive mainframes still
>are, how much power, space, and cooling they require, and how many
>of them we'd require to do the job.  Besides, we'd be replacing one
>sort of mainframe with another (as a part of the overall system),
>and we know that mainframes inherently do not scale to the size of
>the operation we have today, much less where we need to be.
Let's not start that discussion.


>
>--
>Brad Knowles                                MIME/PGP: [log in to unmask]
>    Senior Unix Administrator              <http://www.his.com/~brad/>
><http://swissnet.ai.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xE38CCEF1>