Been there. Done that. Lots of ISPs like AOL do it. Just include an
URL on the first line.
I question anyone's desire to join the ranks of AOL's mail team --
famously non-responsive and frustrating to real mail admins and
useless to end users experiencing protocol-level problems.
Anyway, you know we don't control the "first line" of a DSN. Are you
only considering the fantasy DSN that will exist after we overhaul the
SMTP protocol to put calmer language first? No MTA will ever print
your "No, no, we still want your mail message if you go to our website
first" message BEFORE they print "Permanent failure. Your message
could not be delivered." That is what a 5xx code means, and every
2821-compliant MTA is completely correct in being as firm as they want
in stating the message could not, would not, be accepted. You can't
arbitrarily decide that some 5xx codes are merely advisory. No MTA
vendor will, or should, listen.
Maybe if you wrote an SMTP extension RFC and tried to go through the
actual process. But you can see how easy that was for SPF. And all for
the hacked-together concept of HTTP-before-SMTP? Please.
The web page (customized by a transaction id parameter) has lots of
information. If the MTA reports the reject in a DSN to the sender,
it is even clickable in most email clients.
As you know, real-world experience proves over and over again that
users will not read and follow "lots of information" in a DSN. We are
talking about humans who have plenty of other things to do -- *zero*
of their responsibilities are technical, and they are not your
children or parents. Experienced admins know that users will call the
help desk when they get a DSN that clearly states "The recipient's
mailbox is full": "Is this on our end or theirs?" they'll ask. When a
DSN says "The recipient domain misspelled.com does not exist", they
call and say "Our website is down."
And the protocol-level C/R concept suggests adding to this support
burden an additional PERMANENT FAILURE that, well, isn't reeeeeeally a
failure. "Permanent failure. No, temporary failure. No, um, permanent
for now, but not the next one. Well, unless your company has outbound
gateways on multiple networks and the next one comes from somewhere
else." Epic fail.
Since I pay to receive the mail, and it's my domain, I'll reject
anyone I like, thank you very much. You are thinking in terms of a
large free email provider like gmail.
Look, the tough-guy domain admin thing is itself a marker of FUSSP and
pretty boring. Nobody cares what you do with your personal domain. I
refer to any messaging system whose users have the ability to get you
removed from your job. There are outliers, of course, companies whose
users inexplicably kowtow to the lab rat attitudes and condescension
of their IT staff, and these places may be happy to implement ideas
like 5xx C/R. Otherwise, it is the stuff of home networks and
family-name domains.
Spam may eventually drive large email providers out of business.
I am sure people are not champing at the bit for a hobbyist hosting
provider using draconian C/R. I certainly do not think that Earthlink,
C/R "pioneers", have nabbed a net increase from GMail or Yahoo lately.
--Sandy
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