Bug#510415: tech-ctte: Qmail inclusion (or not) in Debian
Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> writes:
> This says that:
> The third component of the multipart/report consists of the original
> message or some portion thereof. When the value of the RET parameter
> is FULL, the full message SHOULD be returned for any DSN which
> conveys notification of delivery failure. (However, if the length of
> the message is greater than some implementation-specified length, the
> MTA MAY return only the headers even if the RET parameter specified
> FULL.) If a DSN contains no notifications of delivery failure, the
> MTA SHOULD return only the headers.
Well, that's a specification for multipart/report, which qmail doesn't
attempt to comply with. (Neither do many other MTAs, although more do now
than used to.)
At a basic SMTP protocol level, a lot of mail servers no longer return
bounces at *all*, or at least throttle them heavily, because of the abuse
problems. They're increasingly useless.
> From <http://www.dt.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de/~ma/qmail-bugs.html> and
> <http://cr.yp.to/qmail/faq/reliability.html>, it's not at all clear to
> me that qmail handles the headers of a bounced message reliably. All it
> says is that "bounce message contents" are not crashproof - and the
> contents of a bounce message include, among other things, the headers of
> the original message.
It's been a long time since I ran qmail, but as I recall, and according to
the specification, the bounce includes the entire original message. The
reliability note is just djb doing the full disclosure thing that he
sometimes does. The point is that qmail can, in some circumstances, lose
part of the bounce message if the mail system crashes at exactly the wrong
point. Seems like a rather minor problem to me.
The qmail bounce protocol is documented at:
http://cr.yp.to/proto/qsbmf.txt
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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