On Tue, 8 Apr 2003 08:45:22 -0700
Chuq Von Rospach <chuqui(_at_)plaidworks(_dot_)com> wrote:
On Tuesday, April 8, 2003, at 08:07 AM, Jim Youll wrote:
If senders could just learn (I believe they can) to revisit the
outbox
returning the body is mostly a leftover from days before most users
had a gui client and an outbox. does AOL have an outbox? I don't
remember.
This tends to cause pain for me as I sent mail from the same address
from at least three physically discrete systems. Admittedly I'm not the
common case, but when I receive a bounce at claw(_at_)kanga(_dot_)nu and the
OutBox
copy is on my system at work/laptop/palmtop/other_device....
I think the idea of a bounce that contains the original message body
has been the core problem and a vector for spammers... and could be
solved by mandating a return-to-sender of full status data less any
of the message body.
then the spammers will just put their message in an X-header. (grin,
sort of)
I tend to consider the concern about bounce payloads as a red herring.
I've seen a little (not much) deliberate use of bounces by spammers
(usually forgery of messages that look like bounces but aren't), but
more importantly most non-technical users (and that's the majority of
users) tell me that "bounces are confusing, techno-geeky gobbledegook".
Losing message bodies in a bounce would increase that perception and
make bounces even less useful to the vast majority of people who need to
see and understand those bounces (and already have problems with the
current state of affairs).
Error handling should be simple, obvious, and dumb. Big red letters,
simple words, and language that a 3yr old can understand is the name of
the game. The more we trim and curtail the level of helpful and
correlative data in bounces/error messages, the more we make them
opaque, unintelligible, and un-used by users, and therefore the more we
transform email into (effectively) being an unreliable transport:
You never got my message? Oh yeah, I got some confusing bounce
message thing but I couldn't make sense of it.
Yeah, I know, those things are useless. Just FAX/call me next time.
--
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.
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg