Hi Tony,
At 09:32 AM 8/5/2008, Tony Finch wrote:
If a server give a 4yz reply to a RCPT command, should it give up on the
entire transaction and retry it later, or should it only retry those
recipients that were not acceptedd?
I would go for retrying those recipients that were not accepted.
The latter is the common and traditional behaviour, but there's not much
in *821 that says how a client should behave in this situation. There's
even some text in section 4.5.4.1 which suggests the other behaviour is
correct: "When a mail message is to be delivered to multiple recipients,
and the SMTP server to which a copy of the message is to be sent is the
same for multiple recipients, then only one copy of the message SHOULD be
transmitted."
That favors one connection over using a different connection for each
recipient as that can cause resource issues. If you are going to
temporary fail the transaction because the first recipient got a 4yz
reply, you may end up never being able to attempt a delivery for the
other recipients.
Is this an erratum?
I would not label this as an erratum. There are different strategies
that can be used for delivering a message to multiple recipients.
Regards,
-sm