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Date:	Thu, 6 May 2004 11:27:56 PDT7
From:	Peter Skye <pskye@peterskye.com >
Reply-To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Help: list delays gone

Content Type: text/plain

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Mark Abramowitz wrote:
>
> I wonder why people thought InetMail was so great.
> Seems like a major dog from what you're saying.

Remember that we're using a version _older_ than the current InetMail
version. It's possible that these problems were corrected in version 2.

I can't knock InetMail per se. To use a phrase from Mr. Know-It-All II,
"it is what it is". Paul Hethmon supplied OS/2 users with an adequate
SMTP server and list server. If he had found a decent market for his
product and could have afforded to support it, InetMail would be more
robust.

The single biggest design failure in my eyes is that there's no database
control of the messages, hence you can't just look up "all pending
outgoing messages to list members whose SMTP servers are currently
responding" and get those messages out the door ASAP (i.e. there's no
index.idx file in the queue structure). You have to march through all
the messages to see what's there. And InetMail doesn't even do any
marching-and-searching; it just starts at the beginning of the queue
directory and tries each message in sequence. If your good message is
behind 50 spam messages and 25 bad-address messages then your message
won't be sent for quite a while.

Hmm. That's something I haven't tested yet. Suppose you give InetMail
a spam message with an invalid return address that is a valid domain but
does not have an SMTP server. Or which has an MX (Mail eXchanger)
record but no live SMTP server at the specified address. With a bunch
of those, I'll bet you could lock up InetMail for hours.

- Peter

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