On Tue, 2004-03-09 at 12:27 -0600, wayne wrote:
Well, it all depends on your priorities.
If you think that a lost bounce is more important than abusing
innocient third parties, and your ISP lets you get away with abusing
innocient third parties, then go ahead and put your customers
interests ahead of everyone else.
I believe, along with many others, that the lost bounce _is_ far more
important than the potential for bounces to innocent third parties.
Especially since third parties who really care about such things can
easily use VERP or SRS on their own outgoing mail, and then reject
bounces to their 'raw' addresses as I do.
Chances are, you are generating far more bounces to innocient third
parties than to legitimate senders and you may end up on DNSBLs for
this reason.
I know of no DNSBL which you'll get on for the occasional bounce which
can only be triggered when the primary MX host for a domain for which I
provide MX backup services is down.
I'm willing to believe that such exists; I don't think anybody sane
would use it. I know no ISP will object to it.
I do think that all too many mail admins have decided that it is better
to silently drop email rather than generate a bounce.
If even one person thinks that, then it's too many. Just like those who
elect to reject all MAIL FROM:<>, these people really need to be
prevented from ever holding a position of responsibility again.
Right now, the reality is that we have these three choices:
1) reject email during the SMTP session.
I think we have agreed that we should do this as much as possible.
2) accept email and silently drop it instead of creating a bounce.
3) accept email and abuse innocent third parties by sending them bogus
bounces.
What I am advocating is that we need to be able to add a fourth
option:
< sometimes 2 and sometimes 3 >
I disagree. We must never discard valid mail without a response, or the
system becomes irrelevant. Information is lost, and cannot be regained.
--
dwmw2