Bug#510415: tech-ctte: Qmail inclusion (or not) in Debian
Kalle Kivimaa <killer@debian.org> writes:
> Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> writes:
>> Can you expand here on the consequences of ignoring RFC1894? I'm aware
>> that qmail delivery failure mails look different (and, I might argue,
>> gratuitously so) than those of other mail systems, but does this cause
>> interoperability problems for other Internet users?
>
> RFC1894 ignorance produces at least these problems for interoperability
> in Internet:
Thank you for this list! It's very useful for the discussion.
> - Translation of the error messages fails
True, but not, I think, a sufficient problem to warrant keeping it out of
the archive. We have a lot of software that's unfriendly to translations
(unfortuntaley).
> - Mailing list software fails to parse the error message
This is a more serious problem. Mailman, for example, can't handle qmail
bounce messages very well. I don't think it, by itself, would be
sufficiently severe to keep it out of the archive, but it's troubling in
combination with other issues. Were I filing this as a bug, I'd probably
use severity: important.
> - Not MIME-aware, so the bounce of an 8bit MIME mail will be non-MIME
> compliant, and most likely rejected, thus causing a double bounce
The number of mail servers that can't handle 8-bit messages is thankfully
dropping fast. I think technical opinions reasonably differ on the merits
of the MIME insistence on 7-bit transport without ESMTP negotiation. I'm
one of the people who thinks it feels like something out of the 1980s.
> - Original mail is not encapsulated, so any non-text mail gets a
> garbled bounce
This is definitely a usability issue. qmail expects MUAs to have
knowledge of its unusual bounce format if they want to understand the
returned message. I'd probably put this at the same severity as mailing
list interpretation of bounce messages above.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: