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Re: TMDA backscatter

2007-10-09 19:20:37


On Tue, 9 Oct 2007, Douglas Otis wrote:


On Oct 9, 2007, at 1:52 PM, Keith Moore wrote:

Returned message content in DSNs is often essential information for
debugging of mail system problems.   Blindly insisting that DSNs
should not return subject message content is shortsighted.  We have
already crippled the mail system too much as the result of naive
and shortsighted spam countermeasures.

The recommendation was to conform to requirements of RFC3464, but
could have been a bit more explicit in what was meant by original
content.  The concern is the abuse of DSNs as an indirect content
delivery mechanism.   Including original content runs a much greater
risk that any DSN then becomes blocked or dropped.  A more difficult
problem to solve occurs when no DSN is found after a message delivery
fails for some reason.  Less is more in terms of what should be
included of original message content.

Per recipient:
  original-recipient-field
  final-recipient-field
  action-field "failed" / "delayed" / "delivered" / "relayed" /
"expanded"
  status-field
  remote-mta-field
  diagnostic-code-field
  last-attempt-date-field
  final-log-id-field
  will-retry-until-field

Per message:
  original-envelope-id-field
  reporting-mta-field
  dsn-gateway-field
  received-from-mta-field
  arrival-date-field

Is this what you would like to see in a DSN?

As an end user, this would be about useless ... at least w/o a much
smarter client than I'm used to. Some DSNs take days to arrive. Figuring
out what message got lost w/o some portion of the actual user oriented
content is difficult at best. As an end user, I would prefer to get back
exactly what I sent, content wise. Easier to figure out what went wrong
and easier to resend. Also easier to recognized I didn't orginate the
email.

My spam filtering system does quite well eliminating backscatter while
retaining valid DSNs so my feeling is we should focus on making
backscatter detectable and not on crippling the system.

Dave Morris

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