At 12:34 PM -0700 3/26/03, 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.
The point of extending status codes would not be to give the MTA more
options--but to allow it to return something intelligent to the MUA.
A large number of the proposals we have seen have weird return values
like:
- insufficient cpu - run this java applet
- insufficient funds - go to the bank
- blocked due to naughty word - send here to bypass
- blocked due to rogue RBL - click here to complain
- blocked due to lack of intelligence - prove you are a human
and so on.
As you may have gathered from my examples, I'm not fond of these
ideas. Nonetheless, they exist now, and they are growing.
If these systems are going to interoperate with existing transports,
they need to provide some kind of response which the transport can
pass back to the human or back to an MTA or MUA which actually does
understand them.
I think we run the risk of having hundreds of systems all using
different mechanisms. So the question is....
Can we specify a standard MTA response format which will let us
modify MTAs *once*, regardless of the particular scheme the recipient
(and possibly sender) are using? Bonus points if we can degrade
gracefully for non-enhanced MTAs (e.g. specify a standard format for
the text portion that goes along with an existing numeric response).
Like my proposal for a new whitelisting scheme, I'm proposing this
not because I like the systems people are implementing--but because I
don't want to live in a world where everyone implements incompatible
solutions.
--
Kee Hinckley
http://www.puremessaging.com/ Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/ Writings on Technology and Society
I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
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