Subject: RE: [Asrg] Rejecting Email

From: "Bob Atkinson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2003 16:51:23 -0800

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of
Vernon
> Schryver
> Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2003 8:39 AM
> To: [email-masked]

[...]

> It is a good idea to communicate why a mail message was been rejected,
> but it cannot and should not be mandated.  Rejecting mail does not
> differ enough from rejecting connections from HTTP, FTP, or even
telnet
> clients.  Sometimes your security policies allow your computers to
> say why they won't provide a given service, but sometimes they must
> say at most "go away."
> 

[..other good points elided..]

Indeed.

Moreover, received messages may be more than just 'rejected' out of
hand. Depending on settings in a receiver's mail filter and the level of
confidence with which said filter determines a particular message to be
spam, many possible treatments of the message are possible, among them:

	* the message is deleted and not presented to the user at all
	* the message is moved to a distinguished folder
	* the message header is colored grey or purple or orange in 
	  the user's inbox list
	* the message is moved to the bottom of the user's inbox
	* the message was put into a pending state awaiting the result
	  of a challenge sent to its originator
	* etc.

And the details of all these will be different depending on the
particular software installed on the receiving side and the particular
settings made therein by the user and / or system admin.

So even the *taxonomy* with which one might try to describe in a 'bounce
message' what happened to a message within the user experience on the
receiving side is, IMHO, not pragmatically solvable (even if your
security policy would allow you to send such bounces).

	Bob

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---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2003 19:44:36 -0700 (MST)

> From: "Bob Atkinson" <[email-masked]>

> ...

>                                               ...   (even if your

Just for emphasis...

People with sufficient paranoia to be trusted to run systems connected
to the Internet would refuse to tell mail senders about many of those
actions.  We would either lie or be intentionally vague and say nothing
more than "250 2.0.0 Message accepted for delivery."

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]
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