[Mailman-Developers] Re-tries for failed SMTPDirect deliveries

[Barry A. Warsaw]

>>>>> "TW" == Thomas Wouters <thomas@xs4all.net> writes:

    TW> But, assides from delivery, it might be useful to store
    TW> messages which failed elsewhere in the pipeline too; messages
    TW> in the archive pipe, for instance, or the usenet pipe. It can
    TW> currently happen, for instance because of a deadlock, that
    TW> messages just get lost. I haven't looked at the new code yet,
    TW> but imho it shouldn't be too hard to push messages back into
    TW> those pipelines, assuming they fail 'cleanly' (and not with
    TW> files half-written or some such.)

That's actually a good idea.  I think a wrapper around the pipeline
loop, perhaps using a bare try/except (hmm...) is the way to go.  What
you'd probably have to do is have a checklist of delivery modules so
you know 1) which ones you wanted to send the message through; 2)
which ones failed.  And then to know what the disposal is for a
message that failed at a particular step.  Definitely more
complicated, but worth thinking about.  Robustifying message delivery
should be very high on the list, but for 2.0 final we'll have to find
a happy compromise.

    TW> (Then again, I haven't seen failures at all, yet, so I'm not
    TW> too worried for myself.)

Me neither! :)

-Barry