At 11.02 -0400 01-04-03, James M Galvin wrote:
While I accept your point of view as valid, let me say more
about why I
don't agree with it.
The issue, as I see it, is being clear about when a message has been
delivered and at what point in the infrastructure we are
taking action.
The standards that define how to use DNSs today all speak to
the status
of getting a message to its message store. A message is considered
delivered if it gets there and it is the MTA that is
responsible for all
the action.
Vacation notices, in my opinion, are a user agent issue.
The fact that
an MTA is executing the "vacation" program on behalf of a
user or their
agent does not change the fact that the "delivery has been completed"
and the MTA responsibility has at least conceptually ended. Once you
cross that line the envelope information is not what's
important, it is
the message information that is important.
There are different kinds of mailing lists. For large mailing
lists, where the contributor may not even know the names of
all the members, vacation-notices like non-delivery messages
should go to the list maintainer.
For small, closed groups, it is usually more appropriate for
the vacation notices to go to the contributor, and possibly
also with a copy to the list maintainer.
Since it is difficult for a recipient mailer or a
vacation-notice-sender to know, whether a mailing list is of
type 1 or type 2, the proper behaviour is to always send it
to the SMTP sender. It is the task of the mailing list
software to set this appropriately. For example, most large
mailing list maintainer softwares like "Listserv" set the
SMTP sender to the list maintainer.
Smaller closed lists are often created using the alias
functionality in Sendmail, and then the SMTP sender will be
the author of the contribution.
--
Jacob Palme <jpalme(_at_)dsv(_dot_)su(_dot_)se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/jpalme/