What time intervals are good when enabling the earlytalker plugin?
Is there something to be gained by using a time period larger than the default
1 second?
As others have observed, there does appear to be a benefit to higher wait
periods; the 1sec delay was chosen as a conservative default that still yields
a respectable kill rate.
The lowest timeout on SMTP greetings I'm aware of in a mainstream MTA is Exim,
which will wait 30 seconds. Ignoring other issues like MUAs that block on the
SMTP transaction, don't go as high as that, and allow some leeway for network
latency. There's probably a point of diminishing return in how long it's
productive to delay, but I don't believe we have enough data to say. I use
a 6-second wait.
I tried Bob's suggested 13. I got most of my email that I expected to
get, but just got a call from a customer saying her daily Garfield comic
and other emails aren't getting through, or are taking a couple of hours
to deliver. It turns out that in just the past 5 minutes that I've been
watching I've turned away ebay, Qwest, and Hotmail.
I'm setting it back to 1 second.
-- Bryan
