Kai MacTane <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>As things stand with qmail right now, a user sending mail through qmail
>gets one of three things:
>
>1) A successful delivery.
>2) A bounce message (liable to happen within a few minutes under most
> circumstances).
>3) An eventual failure (which takes queuelifetime).
There are, of course, other failure modes that will not result in a
bounce. The SMTP protocol just wasn't designed to be perfectly
reliable. We can whine about that, dream up various mechanisms to
improve reliability, and write code to implement them, but in the end
the situation won't really change. A reliable SMTP would no longer be
SMTP. We'd need new MTA's and MUA's supporting the new protocol. It'd
take years to define the protocol and develop the first
implementations. It'd take more years for every system on the Internet
to upgrade to the new protocol. A quick cost/benefit analysis shows
that it ain't gonna happen.
>In the case of a failure to deliver, the user will not get *any* warning
>about it until queuelifetime has passed. I think that the option to have
>qmail (or a plug-in or add-on program) deliver a message back to the user
>stating that the message hasn't gone through yet, after an
>admin-configurable length of time (presumably somewhere from 4-24 hours),
>would be a useful thing.
There is, as has already been pointed out, a patch that does
this. Unfortunately, that patch has been orphaned.
I still think that if nondelivery warnings are done at all, they
should be generated at the time of the first failed attempt. E.g.,:
Hi. This is your friendly neighborhood mailer. I just tried to
deliver your message to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
But I was unable to reach example.com. I'll keep trying to delivery
the message occasionally for (queuelifetime/(3600*24)) days. If you
don't hear from me again before then, your message was delivered.
>This isn't necessarily a qmail feature request, since I can see a strong
>case to be made for having this be an add-on. But it is a dissenting view
>that I thought should be aired, because I'd like to counterbalance the view
>I see here of "Messages like that are horrible; why would anyone want them?"
I think they're annoying but I would never question anyone's right to
have the feature.
-Dave
