[rt-users] Owner Correspondence Scrip

[Derek D. Martin]

On Sat, May 18, 2002 at 06:19:57PM +0200, Sebastian Flothow wrote:
> At 11:29 Uhr -0400 17.5.2002, Derek D. Martin wrote:
> >If they don't
> >receive a copy of the update, and the tech assigned to the problem
> >drops the ball, they really have no way of knowing whether or not
> >their update even made it into the system.
> 
> I think it's reasonable to assume that the update made it into the 
> system unless one receives a failure notification - that's the way 
> e-mail works (and paper mail too).

One has to wonder if you've ever managed e-mail for a large company...
Misconfigurations often cause mail to vanish into thin air.  Mail
spools filling up could cause this also.  People make mistakes; these
things happen.  Additionally, if there were a problem with the
mailgate program, but that problem did not cause the mailgate program
to exit with a non-zero exit status, you would not receive a failure
notification.

There are lots of reasons why mail might not make it into the system,
but no failure notification gets generated.  Your assumption is
definitely not reasonable.  It would only be reasonable if the mail
system you're using could be 100% guaranteed not to ever fail, and the
mail-gate program was guaranteed to be 100% flawless.  Obviously,
assuming either of these conditions would be foolish.

> Personally, I'd be rather annoyed if I received an auto-response for 
> each update.

Which is very much why I suggested a configurable option.

-- 
Derek Martin
Lead Network Engineer
ddm at skillsoft.com
(603)324-3000 x516