Jerry Stuckle wrote:
On 10/13/2014 7:10 PM, lee wrote:Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> writes:The mail is accepted. What the recipient does with the mail after that is outside the scope of an RFC. There is no obligation on the recipient to inform the sender that he has ripped up the mail and junked it.When the MTA delivers the mail it accepted correctly, then there is no problem. What whoever receives the mail does with it is an entirely different question.Incorrect. All the MTA does is receive the mail. It is then free to queue it up to the user, send it to a SPAM folder or delete it. None of these options is covered by the RFCs.
Well, yes and no. Reporting "message accepted for delivery" as a status code, then silently dropping it, or otherwise sending inaccurate status codes, is kind of questionable.
And... these things ARE covered, at least in part, by RFCs"RFC5321 (latest SMTP spec), Section 6.2. (Unwanted, Unsolicited, and "Attack" Messages) makes for interesting reading.
For example:"As discussed in Section 7.8 and Section 7.9 below, dropping mail without notification of the sender is permitted in practice. However, it is extremely dangerous and violates a long tradition and community expectations that mail is either delivered or returned. If silent message-dropping is misused, it could easily undermine confidence in the reliability of the Internet's mail systems. So silent dropping of messages should be considered only in those cases where there is very high confidence that the messages are seriously fraudulent or otherwise inappropriate."
Miles Fidelman -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra