Date: Mon, 03 Sep 2001 21:01:49 -0400
From: Martin W Sachs <>
MWS2: If the partition happens between the time the To party MSH
reads the message and the time it sends the ACK, for a single hop,
the To MSH will know that it couldn't send the ACK and (hopefully)
retry later.
Actually, that brings up an important question about our failure
model. In a single-hop scenario, if the communication protocol is
HTTP, the sender does know that it can't send.
But in the case of using Email (SMTP) as a communication protocol, the
communication layer can *itself* be multi-hop (using store-and-foward,
a.k.a. "indirect", routing, perhaps directed by MX records from the
DNS, etc), and so it may not be clear to the sender whether the
message could or could not be sent.
