Hi Ned, Translating ESCs to readable plaintext is an exciting proposition but only if a message or other user interface containing the translation does not lose the original plaintext portion in the original DSN report without the user's consent. That's simply a courtesy and, while I'd like to think ESCs can convey every possibility with good enough gradation to be useful, obviously there's the possibility that the code won't be a substitute for the human-readable supplemental lines provided by the sending MTA. Whether that's important to a non-English user is obviously hard to say, but it wouldn't be a problem in any event if every MUA actually did translation of the machine-readable portion for itself. Since (as far as I can see) they do not and the technique is mostly reserved by automatic robots (MLMs, etc), the only question now remaining is how we might let MTAs rewrite DSNs on behalf of our non-English-speaking friends who use MUAs that will not translate.
For me, I'm thinking the answer is that the MTA delivering my mail send not only the DSN to my mailbox but also a rewritten version of DSNs it transports for delivery to local users as detected by a null sender and multipart/report parts; the text part of the report can tell me about the original copy I've been sent (multipart/report MIME parameters telling of the original Message-Id, perhaps, and how this is only a translation?) and contains an enumeration and translation of status in the original's machine-readable section. The machine-readable section could, furthermore, also be rewritten such that parenthetic text be translated to a local language. The resulting message should be a valid DSN in and of itself and, if local users chose, could be the only version of a DSN received (the original being discarded - although perhaps there are dangers there). Also, this service is more-or-less exclusively useful to users reading mail with user agents, since the criticality of multiple DSNs for a single transaction being misinterpreted by a computer program to mean multiple identical failures (EG: MLMs seeing two failed sends when only one is intended) might be significant. There would have to be some breathing room somewhere in the spec to avoid that possibility if this sort of thing were to be preferable. Alternatively, if it isn't actually necessary to preserve the machine-readability of translations, then breaking the DSN format isn't an issue and the problem goes away. The point is to have machine-assisted translation but only if the kind of rewriting done isn't destructive, and I think a separate message is the best way, although MIME encapsulation is just as likely to work. As a sidenote: sendmail seems to do a limited amount of translation on SMTP responses containing ESCs. You can find them in DSN transcripts in the plaintext portion of the report. The translations are not thorough and are based as much on the code as on the state sendmail's client code was in when it hit trouble. Cheers, Sabahattin -- Sabahattin Gucukoglu <mail<at>sabahattin<dash>gucukoglu<dot>com> Address harvesters, snag this: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: +44 20 88008915 Mobile: +44 7986 053399 http://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/
