The presence of this method was confusing, and mostly present for backwards
compatibility. Let's get rid of it.

Part of #11733

Part of #9744

Removes all redundant `# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-` lines from files, as python 3 automatically reads source code as utf-8 now.

`Signed-off-by: Jonathan de Jong <jonathan@automatia.nl&gt;`>

We have set the max retry interval to a value larger than a postgres or
sqlite int can hold, which caused exceptions when updating the
destinations table.

To fix postgres we need to change the column to a bigint, and for sqlite
we lower the max interval to 2**62 (which is still incredibly long).

Track the time that a server started failing at, for general analysis purposes.