On Nov 27, 2009, at 9:56 AM, Tony Finch wrote:
On Thu, 26 Nov 2009, Steve Atkins wrote:
Some MTAs only make one line of the rejection available in their logs, or
don't make it easy to get the rest.
They're broken.
That's not a terribly useful opinion on an operational subject, even if
it's one I tend to agree with.
It's just something that is the case. If you're wanting to communicate
with the people whose mail you are rejecting, to the extent you want
to send back screeds of multiline response, then you also want to
make sure that they can read the critical data in the (fairly common)
case that the multiline responses aren't recorded in the main logs.
If you're returning multiline responses, make sure that the first line has
the critical data, and use the remainder for additional info.
IME broken delivery failure reports include the last line of the SMTP reply.
Putting the critical information on the first and last lines would seem
a good plan, then, and treat the remainder as fluff that may be useful
to some readers.
Current best practice seems to be to put an explicit rejection code or
(equivalently) a URL in the first line of the rejection message, perhaps
followed by more human readable information.
Cheers,
Steve