From: "Eric D. Williams" <eric(_at_)infobro(_dot_)com>
...
Should sites that block/filter, etc. include a 'standardized' link to a
statement of policy or 'reason' description for blocking the message? Of
course we do have the abuse@ address [RFC2142] that is defined for CRM but what
if there were also a standard address or 'link' to policy descriptions for
blocking/filtering behavior? This is not an proposal for a standard message
but a standard Location: for such a message.
HTTP is not SMTP. If it were not impossible, it would also be a
mistake to mandate that every SMTP server be associated with an HTTP
server. Thus "link" cannot mean "URL". It would be almost as bad to
require that every SMTP server be associated with an STMP auto-responder
of some kind.
It is a good idea to communicate why a mail message was been rejected,
but it cannot and should not be mandated. Rejecting mail does not
differ enough from rejecting connections from HTTP, FTP, or even telnet
clients. Sometimes your security policies allow your computers to
say why they won't provide a given service, but sometimes they must
say at most "go away."
There have been suggestions or proposals in this mailing list for a format
or schema for more lucid bounce messages. I'm convinced that is hopeless
by many things including the 20 years of efforts to make STMP error
messages understandable by more than high priests. Still, such efforts
might have good results and are unlikely to do any harm here, because
bad results could not be imposed by pointy haired fiat.
(Anyone with much experience in the industry has seen efforts to make
computer error messages understandable do serious harm by making the
message long and unintelligible to absolutely everyone, including the
user interface mavens or other non-technical people responsible for
the "improved" messages.)
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com
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