Stephen Warren <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On this specific point - what should the behavior be? I'm honestly > confused *why* the person who reported the problem with the > exception handler that I added thought the behavior was incorrect - > there *was* a problem, and it was reported as an SMTP error message.
Take another look at the thread[1]. The user sent mail to a malformed address, and tmda-ofmipd returned an error. That's not the behavior one expects when they send mail to a bogus address. They send the message, it gets transferred, and the relaying SMTP server bounces it back with an informative message. If tmda-ofmipd is circumventing this process, it's going to cause confusion, not necessarily because tmda-ofmipd is wrong for trapping an exception, but that it's not the expected behavior. > I would expect any well written SMTP client to display an error > message dialog to the end-user in *both* cases. Most clients seem to > hide the specific error details, so I'd guess the error message the > user sees would often be the same in both cases (perhaps with a > details button so the raw SMTP error message could be displayed in > the 2nd case). tmda-ofmipd does display an error message dialog though (or at least it used to and did for years). It's just a big long Python exception rather than a simple message like "Internal exception in tmda-ofmipd." But that's okay with me because such cases are rare, and it allows us to discover cases where we might be able to catch the exception and handle it. > Now, the problem reporter said (2) above made the end-user think there > was a problem with the mail system. Well, If I Recall Correctly, there > *was* a problem - the SMTP server behind tmda-ofmipd rejected the > message. In that scenario, shouldn't tmda-ofmipd (and also the MUA) > report this as a problem to the user? No, I think the relaying SMTP server (Postfix, qmail, etc) should deal with this and report this as problem to the user. When a user sends mail to a bogus address, he expects to find a bounced message in his mailbox informing him of this. This is just one example, but I think the general principle is important. I also want to get away from trying to code around deficiencies in Thunderbird. Thunderbird handles some of these cases differently (incorrectly I believe) than every other MUA. tmda-ofmipd shouldn't be covering Thunderbird's ass. By doing so it prevents those bugs from being fixed in Thunderbird. So I'm just saying, let's make sure we are thinking about these issues from a wide and general perspective. Footnotes: [1] http://mla.libertine.org/tmda-users/2006-10/threads.html#00016 _____________________________________________ tmda-users mailing list (tmda-users@tmda.net) http://tmda.net/lists/listinfo/tmda-users
