Re: SMTP slow???

["Paul E. Hoffman" <phoffman@xxxxxxx>]

>Take the small trading partner that does not have a permanent connection.
>Where does his EMail/EDI sit in the mail queues? If on his providers mail
>server, then that provider can very easily have legal obligations for
>guaranteed delivery.

Good point: his ISP is holding his mail. I thought you were concerned with
the hops along the way with unrelated companies. Yes, in the case of
companies without persistent connections, there is some ISP responsibility
if there is mail in Company X's inbox and the ISP's hard drive crashes and
they go to yesterday's backup. Mumble...

>Of course, the small trading partner could run his own SMTP engine that,
>when connected to the net, goes out and hits all of the regular trading
>partners...

It doesn't need to do this: it just has to be up at the designated IP
address when all of the trading partners retry sending. However, if I saw
an outgoing order for a trading partner sitting in my outgoing queue for
very long, I'd have questions about that partner. Mumble...

>>Or, I think for safety, no "enroute". It is easy to build in no hops for
>>mission-critical partners. Hops are OK for non-critical pairs, but receipts
>>would be strongly advised.
>
>You always have your own firewalls to get in your way too...

Yes, but you supposedly have control over them. They're inside the
demarkation of "us" and "them".

--Paul E. Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium