Re: With hindsight
All they had to do to figure out load balancing was ask one of the major Usenet outfits. Wouldn't have changed the main problem, though ... AOL's mail system was a home-grown clusterfuck that had Internet email grafted onto it as an afterthought. The guy that ran it (not this "Bert" character, but rather someone I'll call "L") told me on more than one occasion that he wished he could rip it all out and start over with something sane like sendmail (!!), but the PTB wouldn't let him.
qmail and postfix had nothing to do with AOL's issues. qmail was written to address security issues that weren't seen as a problem when sendmail was written; postfix was written to be an easier alternative to sendmail. qmail's bones were laid down in late 1995, before the AOL meltdown. postfix was an IBM-Watson reearch project about a year later, and I have it on good authority that IBM didn't give a rat's ass about anything AOL was doing.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
