Becky Says...

August 2004

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August 23

It's a good thing I don't get upset if notify e-mail messages bounce back to me. Otherwise, I would have been doubly upset after sending the notify for yesterday's entry.

I'm on my own list, and the list lives only with me. Ordinarily, when I send a notify message, I receive mine the next time I get mail. But not the one mentioned above. I wondered why it was coming so slowly, but decided to give it a few more minutes.

The next ping of the mail server brought a bounce message. You guessed it. My copy of the notify message bounced back to me.

It is really a little disconcerting to have a mail server's daemon tell you that you don't exist.

I did all the things one does to check for signs of life---checked my pulse, made sure my breathing was still happening, checked the mailbox records for the domain---and pronounced myself alive.

As a failsafe, I had started sending the notifies to myself at a second address a while back. I checked that address and found the notify message waiting, as I expected it would be. I do this doubling-up not because I'm so enamored of my notify notes---they're rarely anything other than the fact that an entry is posted and its general topic---but to make sure the message actually got sent and that the link still works a few minutes after I put it in the message.

Once I was reasonably sure the message got where it was to go, and that nothing had gone wrong with the link, I decided to quit worrying about being told I didn't exist.

But I may never believe that daemon again.

Text © copyright 2000-2004 Becky