Florian Weimer <fw(_at_)deneb(_dot_)enyo(_dot_)de> writes:
VERP is basically dead for practical purposes.
Do you mean in the sense of being absolutely reliable, or in the sense of
being widely used?
If you mean the latter, you're wrong. I read the bounce logs of
Stanford's mail servers regularly. :)
At work, we run a small read-only mailing list which mainly targets
German IT workers. Apparently, many larger institutions gateway mail
from RFC 821/822 format to some X.400 derivate or proprietary mail
implementations, and these gateways throw away the distinction between
envelope address and header address.
As a result, even delivery failure notifications are regularly sent to
the address in the From: header, not just the regular stream of
out-of-office notifications during school vacations.
There is always some mail system out there that's sufficiently perverse
that it will break anything that you try to do, but that's not a reason
not to do something.
The basic idea of VERP is fundamentally sound and solves one of the major
problems in mailing list management, namely correlating a DSN with a list
member when all of the forwarding information for how the message got
there has been systematically destroyed by bad mail systems.
--
Russ Allbery (rra(_at_)stanford(_dot_)edu)
<http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>