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Re: [Asrg] Re: 5c. Message Status

2003-03-26 12:47:48

On Wednesday, March 26, 2003, at 11:34  AM, Vernon Schryver wrote:

I think standardized error messages for computers has worse problems.
Consider the example of SMTP response coes.  There are only 3 results
answers that computers can deal with, "it worked," "it failed but
might work if you try again later," and "it failed--go away."  In
practice the other literally millions of status codes and extended
status values are wasted bandwidth for humans and computers.


Not true.

for humans, it's very useful. At least in theory, they can get on the phone or send e-mail to a site to say "do you know that your mail is returning with xxxxx" -- and some of us still, in fact, do that when we can.

for computers, it's less useful but not useless. If anything, I'd like to see the standardization for "hard bounce", "soft bounce", "processing bounce" to be improved, because we do try to read the tea leaves and handle soft bounces (over quota, for instance) differently than hard bounces (user unknown), because a soft bounce implies mail might stop bouncing sometime in the future, while hard bounce implies game over (even though we find hard bounces to actually be soft, and soft bounces to actually be hard). And anything that's a "processing bounce" (disk full, as opposed to over quota, although many sites misrepresent these) ought to be considered very temporary, so they ought to be a third category, but for practicality, should be considered at least soft bounces. And yes, there are different processing regimens for soft and hard bounces, so it matters...


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