On Sun, 6 Apr 2003 18:31:59 -0400 (EDT)
Daniel Feenberg <feenberg(_at_)nber(_dot_)org> wrote:
The proposal is that MTAs reject messages before acceptance rather
than bounce them.
Not quite. The proposal was initially to remove the bounce error
channel entirely, and then later that MTAs which are public-facing (eg
primary MXes) not generate bounces at all and instead return rejection
codes. Both approaches would require vast architecural changes to
deployed mail systems, and would necessarily deliver a system that is
bot fragile and prone to silently losing mail.
On the other side we have the statement that this will kill UUCP.
If receiving MXes can not generate bounces, then they must have perfect
knowledge of the mail systems behind them. This is tantamountly
impossible in several cases, among which are out-of-domain aliasing,
.forwards, and (often) UUCP gateways. If bounces as an OOB error form
remain allowed, then it doesn't break UUCP (or much at all).
Then again, if bounces are still allowed, then all this proposal really
sums to is, "Please be more aggressive about rejecting mail at the SMTP
level rather than accepting and later bouncing." There's little to
argue with such a best-practices and better-efficiency approach.
This is really a stretch. UUCP is fully capable of handling message
rejection. So no matter how many sites start stop accepting invalid
mail and responding later with a DSN in favor of rejecting the message
promptly while still connected, there is no adverse affect on UUCP
sites.
Which was not the point discussed.
It is possible that some site might take this one step farther (one
step too far?) and stop accepting bounce messages entirely on the
grounds that they were no longer necessary. I haven't read anything
here that suggests that as a course of action.
The initial proposal was to entirely do away with bounce messages.
That would adversely affect the ability of UUCP sites to notify those
over-zelous sites that their mail had bounced. It wouldn't affect
anyone else, and it wouldn't affect any valid mail.
Doing such would have adverse impacts as it removes the entire OOB error
channel. Susie Secretary no longer has a way of telling that she typoed
an address. Bad bad bad.
So why is this so controversial?
Because they were different contentions than you have listed.
--
J C Lawrence
---------(*) Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
claw(_at_)kanga(_dot_)nu He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/ Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.
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