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Re:Support for Internationalized Explanations

2004-07-26 03:47:23
"Andriy G. Tereshchenko" encouraged me thus:

So,  I think I've concluded that I should drop this proposal.
Anyone think I should keep going?

Keep going.I know a lot of email users who does not know english.
I dislike current english-only bounces thich result in support call each time
this kind of email recieved.



Right then!

Here is my PLAN B. This is a completely different technical solution.

 "Auto-insertion of a web resource".

Some MTA somewhere in the chain is going to compose a full mail message to go
back to the user, which is to include the explanation text derived from the TXT
record.

We define a particular structure of explanation text, of the form:

http-URL [whitespace any-other-text]

If the explanation text starts with (or is composed entirely of) a valid URL
which starts with "http:", then the referenced resource (Web page / document
etc.)  is downloaded by the MTA using an HTTP GET request and is inserted into
the mail message as MIME content.

This downloaded page becomes _the_ explanation that the end-user sees.  The
'any-other-text' part of the explanation text is discarded.

Note that this URL will have passed through the macro-expanding process, like
any other explanation, so the URL GET request can have all the relevant SPF
info. included in it as URL request parameters (as shown in the third example in
section 5.2 of the SPF draft).

The downloaded resource can, of course, be in any language and use any
MIME-acceptable encoding.


If the URL is syntactically invalid, or if the referenced resource is not able
to be accessed, then the entire explanation text (including the 'bad' URL) is
inserted into the message (i.e. it defaults back to the current SPF-spec
behaviour).

This auto-expansion could be included in the SPF spec. as an optional MTA
capability; nothing gets lost or broken if it is not done.


How's that?

Chris