On Feb 5, 2010, at 10:36 AM, Chris Lewis wrote:
Daniel Feenberg wrote:
On Fri, 5 Feb 2010, John Levine wrote:
I haven't been following this thread very closely, but why not just
establish a standard role account on the MUAs designated POP or IMAP
server? Such as arf(_at_)pop(_dot_)example(_dot_)com? It effectively
"preconfigures" the
MUA since "arf" is standard and "example.com" is already known to the MUA.
The less configuration the better, I think.
Sorry, wouldn't work. The name of the POP or IMAP server need not
bear any relationship to any email address. For example, on my
system, the server is named imap.iecc.com (yes, even for POP, it
deters the clueless) but there are not imap.iecc.com addresses at all.
I don't understand why this is relevant. If the MTA operator doesn't want to
support this feature, he doesn't have to. But if he does wish to support the
feature he needs to supply an MX record or accept mail on the POP or IMAP
server. Is that such a great burden? Compared to the other suggestions here?
Yes. Why tie the ARF path to the mailboxes by naming convention? Don't need
to.
It's not an ARF path. ARF is just a mail format, one that is used in many other
contexts. I'm going to pretend you said "feedback path" and
"feedback(_at_)feedback(_dot_)domain(_dot_)com" instead. :)
Use arf(_at_)arf(_dot_)domain(_dot_)com(_dot_) If they're the same machine,
fine, make arf.domain.com alias to imap.domain.com. If they're not, you
don't have to rename your mail infrastructure or screw around with forwarding
on the imap machine that you may have no control over.
How does the MUA autodiscover "domain.com", though, so as to create
"feedback(_at_)feedback(_dot_)domain(_dot_)com"?
The only setting that the MUA is likely to have access to is the name of the
IMAP or POP3 server. As IMAP and POP3 are not name-based, the entry there could
easily be domain.com, mail.domain.com, imap.domain.com or pop.domain.com or
smtp.domain.com or even www.domain.com.
One option is to have the MUA "use some heuristic to find the 'domain'
associated with that hostname", but past experience with SSP suggests that it
makes people point and laugh at you and start mentioning things like
imap.aardvark.us.com.
Another would be to prepend "feedback." to the imap server name - so do an MX
lookup for "feedback.imap.domain.com" to discover whether it's to enable the
TiS button. That'll either need a DNS record added for every possible name for
the IMAP server, or accept that it won't autoconfigure unless the recipient
uses the name for the IMAP server you're expecting, either of which seems
reasonable.
(That doing MX lookups is not something that MUAs typically need code for, and
that isn't supported by base API, is a minor issue but worth mentioning).
Cheers,
Steve
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