Ferri Andy Ch. writes: > DSN is very important to me, and I believe also important for a lot of people, and > it's very shame to discover that qmail (claimed as more advance than sendmail) > not support this feature. I agree, but I also understand the scope of work that's required to implement DSN in any mail server, and I can see why it's unlikely that you'll see it in Qmail. The four RFCs that collectively define DSN run about 90 pages long. Much like everything that goes with SMTP, the correct implementation of DSN is very arcane, convoluted, and idiotic. In fairness, I don't see how the DSN functionality could be implemented in a more straightforward fashion. Like with everything that has to remain backwards compatible with 20 years of legacy code and protocols, DSN is evil. > Security is top priority in qmail, as far as I know, but > how come the nice security support feature like DSN is out of questions? Very funny. Thanks for a good laugh. DSNs offer no security whatsoever. > Please at least someone give me a good reason why, or maybe explain to me that > DSN is not so important as I think now. I really appreciate any kind of response. No, it is important, and I agree that DSNs are superior to Return-Receipts, and provide very usefull functionality. However, I urge you to read RFCs 1891 through 1894, and see for yourself what a bitch they are to implement in any mail server. People who write free or semi-free stuff do it in their spare time, and all of them have paying day jobs. If you set out to design a mail server from scratch, given a right design, I suppose, the implementation of DSN can be done reasonably well. However, retro-fitting DSN into an existing mail server is unlikely to be a very easy thing to do, and is probably more trouble than its worth. The most likely result is some monstrosity that you'll spend the next two years debugging, before it works properly. > At least I know that this qmail community is as friendly and helpful as any other > Linux community. Qmail community is not a Linux community. -- Sam
