Re: Re: moving mail between folders is intermittently failing

On May 6 2010, Mark Crispin wrote:

>Reliable does not mean "does not fail".

Coincidentally, nobody said it did. Interesting!

This is another fun historical dissertation, at whose core is: "change the 
RFCs, and until then maintain some righteous anger."

>What you think of as being "failure" are all application layer concept:
>
>[1] The application received a session disconnect (FIN) from TCP.  This is
>completely an application concept; TCP considers this to be a completely
>normal shutdown of the session.
>
>[2] The application received a session reset (RST) from TCP.  This
>indicates that the application attempted to communicate with a TCP peer
>that does not exist.  This is what most people (mistakenly) call a "TCP
>failure".
>
>[3] The application unilaterally decides that a failure has occurred.
>
>Now, [1] and [2] generally indicate the demise of the peer, with [1] being
>the normal and expected result of a mutually-agreed upon demise.  [2] is
>not supposed to happen with debugged implementations, except when a
>link-level disconnect outlasts a FIN-wait.
>
>But neither of these are what the discussion is about.  That is [3]:

That is quite a sleight of hand there. It makes your pats on the heads of 
the "young'ns" look even sillier. You've oversimplified [2[ to the point 
where it edges from "oversimplified" to "misleading."

-Brian
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