Mark Shewmaker wrote:
On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 11:20:16AM -0500, Martin G. Diehl wrote:
For what it's worth, I suggest the use of static web pages
that will work on *all* browsers.
You bring up something I had completely missed.
So I would suggest that perhaps the static pages referred to in error
codes point to a separate host and url that is *just* for that sort of
thing, so these can be kept up for a long time, and more easily restored
in case of problems with a more complex spf.pobox.com equivalent as that
other side grows/shrinks/changes.
Perhaps one would expect that the forwarding service is smart enough to
look at the User-Agent: header sent by the client during an HTTP GET
request, and present an alternate static page instead of a 302 Moved
error if the client cannot handle redirects. Then whoever maintains the
redirect will have to maintain the alternate page as well.
A good point nonetheless, and it should add the requirement of ensuring
that the forwarding service sensibly handles the case of old browsers.
I wonder if there is a list somewhere of the browsers in question.
However, a point of caution: assuming that an email client has browser
capability is a poor assumption indeed:
Some time ago, I dealt with adorama for some photo gear. My mailserver
sends back challenge-response URLs for unknown email senders. Even
though several individuals tried to contact me from adorama, they never
responded to the challenges.
After inquiring on the phone as to why they never respond to challenges,
the answer was that the equipment they use is very very ancient,
mainframe based, and it does not understand HTTP. Based on the needs of
the sales department, they never needed anything more current, as the
system they have meets their needs.
Perhaps a good idea would be to use a 2-3 line explanation in the SMTP
reject error in addition to the URL, so browsing would be less crucial.
Greetings,
Radu.