The DSN standards (RFC 1891, 1892, 1894) have now been
ready for more than two years. Yet very few mailers support
them. What can be done to get more support?
Does sendmail produce DSN in the standardized format? If
yes, how can we get people to update to a more recent
version of sendmail. If not, how can we get it to support
them?
Mail clients can support DSNs in several ways. I list them
below in my suggested priority order:
(1) Display standardised DSNs in a standard format, which
contains the information the user needs in easy to read
format.
(2) Allow filtering incoming DSNs to a special folder.
(3) A command to look at a sent message, and then get a
list of all delivery and receipt notifications for this
message, one line per note. Something like this:
Received by: xxx
Received by: (printed on paper) yyy
Delivered to: zzz
Could not be delivered to: qqq
This option is of course very useful in conjunction
with option (2).
(4) Commands to request delivery and receipt notifications
and to request supression of them.
Mail clients cannot be expected to support this until
sendmail and other MTA software starts supporting them.
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Jacob Palme <jpalme(_at_)dsv(_dot_)su(_dot_)se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/~jpalme