On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 09:18:03PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > 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. The backscatter problem certainly gives a compelling reason to try to reject at SMTP and avoid the need to bounce, but once a message of mine has been accepted by a remote server, if it fails to be delivered I do expect a notification. Servers that refuse to do this are in violation of the protocol, and undermine a core feature of SMTP (reliability). > > 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. If it loses enough of the bounce message then the DSN is potentially rendered useless. I think that's a "data loss" bug, just as I think a package sending your existing files off into la-la land on an OOD condition is a data loss bug. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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