Re: Lots of broken mail at Xtra

On Thu, Jun 07, 2001 at 01:57:10PM +1200, Don Stokes wrote:

Ben Martel wrote:

...

Don,

...

If you really must use POP to retrieve multiple users' mail, use multiple mailboxes and query 'em all. Better still, use a real transport protocol. SMTP with ETRN or dial-up triggering strikes me as a *much* better (if not perfect) solution.

<infomercial>Take a look @ CLEARs mailbagging product. It even does it on dialup connect or dial-up triggering as you suggested :)</infomercial>

Clear's mailbagging product is precisely the sort of thing I had in mind. Easily the most elegant way using currently well-deployed standards and software, and not that hard to implement either -- the RADIUS server just needs to have a list of domains associated with each dial-up user ID so it can bump the queue for those domains when that user successfully logs in. It also doesn't require the user to maintain any more authentication tokens or anything, just a running SMTP server.

It's a little more complicated than that with CLEAR Net's product, since they support ETRN-like queue-flushing from dynamically-assigned subscriber addresses, so they need some custom queue-flusing (you can't trust the DNS to find an MX).

The downside is that it does require the user end to open an SMTP port to their mail server. The same applies to ETRN or ATRN based arrangements. Of course one can filter on source address, but that leaves one susceptible to problems if the ISP moves their mail servers around.

ETRN is actually optional with mailbagging, too. Connection attempts will begin shortly after the mailbagging user connects, and will repeat at regular intervals if there is mail to deliver. The following script may be useful: for n in ${things_involving_mail} do olof ${n} done Joe --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog