At 02:26 PM 4/09/01 +1200, Simon Lyall wrote:

On Tue, 4 Sep 2001, Don Stokes wrote:

...

Most mailers have a hard time with huge queues of undeliverable mail, so such an MX is not going to be as efficient at dealing with the backlog when the primary comes back up as just leaving the mail where it is on client servers.

The thing is it moves the load from our smtp servers (which last time I looked had a lot of undelived emails for xtra customers) onto a machine run by Xtra. Due to the amount of queued email on our servers we have had to start taking actions to prevent delays of email to other sites.

Yup. Not having a backup MX makes xtra's problem everyone elses problem instead.

You can also optimise the backup MX server for dealing with a large queue to a single destination rather than a constrant stream of email to many destinations. There are also other tricks you can run depending on your mail software and network setup.

Not to mention that mail servers around the country trying to connect to xtra's all the time wastes other peoples bandwidth. With a backup MX the mail queuing and retrying would be occuring between their backup and primary MX which in all likelyhood would be internal traffic (perhaps even on the same switched ethernet) rather than over national links. Dequeuing when the problem was resolved would be faster and more efficient than waiting for various random servers around the country to retry.

The anoying bit is that Xtra has not acknowledged this in public at all, we are getting our customers blaming us for delays in email getting to Xtra addresses.

Well actually, they have acknowledged the problem on their website, (I was surprised, I was expecting the standard "There are no knon problems with the Xtra network") so short of making a public annoucement on TV and radio I don't see what else they could do to raise awareness to the average user :) Regards, Simon --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog