Subj : An actual useful thing
To   : All
From : andrew clarke
Date : Mon Dec 21 2020 11:53 pm

21 Dec 20 23:34, I wrote to Maurice Kinal:

ac> This is just creating busywork for the handful of developers left (eg.
ac> me, occasionally) and new bugs for no benefit.

Maybe it's too late, but if you want to actually create something useful (and long overdue), come up with some ideas of transparently detecting and overcoming mail delivery failures in FidoNet.

In the 25+ years I've been using FTN software this has become my biggest gripe. The software has no way of detecting that a node has gone down and automatically routing around the problem.

Because the only way I can tell if my uplinks go down is if I check my binkd logs for persistent errors, then manually intervene. With that part requiring a lot of mundane re-linking of echomail areas from another uplink I'm "friends" with, assuming they even carry the echos I've become disconnected from.

Not to mention netmails that never get delivered because an intermediate node went down permanently.

Admittedly this scenario is much less likely than it was in the dialup days, now that running a 24/7 binkp node costs very little, and hardware is much more reliable.

But there's always the possibility your uplink will suddenly disappear without warning.

Echomail "meshing" does help a bit, but obviously not with netmail.

Best of all, solving this problem shouldn't break any existing software, because it would be entirely opt-in. But beneficial for the people who opted-into the system, if it worked well.

--- GoldED+/BSD 1.1.5-b20180707
* Origin: Blizzard of Ozz, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia (3:633/267)