At 8:37 PM 7/17/95, Winship wrote:
 
>I mentioned the 4 hour stuff as it is relatively new
 
        You're showing your age, Doug... :-).
 
        Sending non-delivery warning messages after 4 hours is part of the
"default" configuration for Sendmail 8.6.x, and is often set in Sendmail
5.65 (+/- IDA).  One of these two versions ship with almost every
commercial version of Unix, and are widely used on free versions of Unix
such as Linux or NetBSD, making sendmail the most widely used mail
distribution program used on Unix systems and probably on the internet as a
whole.  The reason that these errors seem "new" is that a lot more people
are using Unix systems these days than they were 5 years ago or even two
years ago, and there are a lot more unix installs of Listserv than there
were five years ago as well :-)  Conversely, the number of VMs that are
actively used by individuals has been decreasing for the last five years,
and LMAIL doesn't generate the warnings we're complaining about (I don't
think... it's been a while).
 
        Often, the 4 hour warning will come *from your local system*.  Look
carefully.  The message will be addressed from [log in to unmask],
and will say "Cannot deliver mail to so and so: connection defered".  This
basically means that the internet connection to the destination machine is
down, which is never a suprise on the Internet.  It seems to happen more in
Europe and the Far East than it does in the US.  In any case, sendmail on
your local machine is telling you that it can't connect and it'll keep
trying for (typically) 5 more days before bouncing the message back to you
as undeliverable.  If you consider this a problem, you can bug your
sysadmin to change it.  I have sendmail on NetSpace configured to send a
warning after a day -- that way users will know that their mail to a friend
may not have gotten through, but listowners aren't inundated with warning
notices -- things often go down for a few hours but not as often for a full
day.
 
        "Real" remote warnings are often the fault of the user.  If the
machine running Listserv can send mail to the remote machine, and the
*remote* machine's mailer cannot deliver it, it's generally some kind of
quota problem -- the user has used up their allocation of mail or disk
space.  This seems quite common on AOL, as we've already discussed in the
past months.
 
        The most recent post on this subject complained primarily about
sites that send out acknowledgement of mail reciept and other such
niceties.  There, I can't help you, except to say that procmail for Unix
and the commercial version of Eudora for Mac and Windows have filtering
capabilities that I take advantage of for exactly this kind of nonsense.
 
>One postmaster has deigned to answer my plea for mercy, said it's part
>of sendmail 8 and maybe the next version will handle list mail better.
>Wonderful, what about now?
 
You can spew technobabble at him.  Tell him to edit his /etc/sendmail.cf
file and change the line that says
OT5d/4h
to:
OT3d/1d
 
I haven't heard anything about changes in delivery warnings for sendmail 8.7...
 
Lee Silverman     [log in to unmask]      http://www.netspace.org/users/lee/
         Live each day as if your life had just begun.  --  Goethe