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...
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:
...
A bounce message should, in addition to ancillary information such as
headers, have two distinct components:
a human-readable message explaining the reason for the bounce
a machine-readable message with the necessary reason codes and
other supporting information
Human readable messages won't always work by themselves. For example, if
the message is bounced with an explanation in English to a reader who
understands only Chinese, then the utility will be low.
If there were a standard syntax for a machine-readable bounce
explanation, then MUAs could convert those explanations into something
that makes sense in the context of the reader. It could automatically
say "Eudora" instead of "MUA", and say "XYZ's mail system" instead of
"relay ABC". There might even be a little competition among developers
as they strive to write the most sensible and intelligible
interpretations of the standard. The same thing has already been done
with e-mail addresses -- some users have never seen
"john q. doe" <jdoe(_at_)somedomain(_dot_)com>
they only know address books, without any <>s, and otherwise get along
quite nicely.
The machine-readable message would, of course, facilitate automated
handling -- perhaps the mail system can deal with the problem, without
user intervention.
A similar more descriptive and well-defined set of SMTP error codes
would also help along those lines, but (maybe?) the length of the human
message would be more limited.
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