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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