Mail problems with freebsd.org

Mark Knight markk at knigma.org
Tue May 30 22:51:37 BST 2000


In article <200005300738.IAA00543 at hak.lan.Awfulhak.org>, Brian Somers
<brian at awfulhak.org> writes
>I think this is just unforgivable.  BT internet's services suck 
>*really* big time !  In fact, just to pooh-pooh their entire mail 
>service (we already know that the incoming MXs are really slow and 
>that the relay either doesn't accept mail or takes forever to 
>forward), I've finally figured out why my fetchmail setup has been 
>hanging.... I recently added a poll to awfulhak at btinternet.co.uk !

BT's POP service by far the worst out of 5 that I regularly use from my
mail client.

>Just to add fuel to the fire, and in case I haven't mentioned it 
>before, in the evenings, I (and 3 colleagues) experience 30% packet 
>losses a lot of the time.

I've been finding this better recently:

  o International bandwidth for downloads saturates my ISDN most times.
  o They consistently saturate ISDN to Giganews (premium US
    news service).
  o The transparent http web proxy seems reliable and fast.
  o UK connectivity on the up (from my perspective), with cvsups from
    storm now averaging 13 minutes.

>Also, if you ``enable dns'' when negotiating a connection to bt, they 
>will supply the IP numbers of some DNS servers that are over A YEAR 
>OUT OF DATE !  If you contact BT support about this, they tell 
>you that you should use the DNS servers that they publish on their 
>web pages - the ones right above the paragraph that says "if you can 
>auto-negotiate DNS, this is better" !
>
>I haven't tried their news service.  I'm sure that works perfectly.

Don't touch with a barge poll!

>I'll keep the account because of the free calls, a single UDP 
>connection through them is all they'll ever see though !!!

Hopefully Demon (or another 'quality' ISP will announce the (hopefully
good), terms of their Surftime product,

In the meantime, BT Internet are okay for pure bandwidth IMHO, assuming
you run your own smart SMTP host, caching name server (forwarding to
something reliable) and purchase a news feed from elsewhere.

Oh, and don't rely on BT for your primary mailbox!

>Perhaps BTI could do with a bit of FreeBSD consultancy and the 
>installation of a few dozen FreeBSD mail servers.

I think the rot goes a lot deeper than a few new servers!
-- 
Mark Knight                       PGP Public Key: finger mkn at knigma.org




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