[Asrg] where the message originated

[Paul Russell]

On 1/19/2009 6:08 AM, Ian Eiloart wrote:
> There are at least two very good reasons for wanting to bounce rather than 
> reject emails.
> 
> a) when a message has two or more local recipients, you can't have 
> different policies for each recipient about what to reject. You reject for 
> all or no recipients. There are some workarounds, but they're kludgy and 
> cause their own problems.

Perhaps that is true of your MTA, but we have been doing this with sendmail for
several years.  This is a supported feature which can be enabled or disabled by
any reasonably competent system administrator.  I would not describe it as a
'work-around' or a 'kludge', and it has not caused us any problems.

 > b) when you reject a message you can try to explain why, but often the
 > sending MTA will throw away some or all of your explanation. Usually, it
 > will wrap your explanation inside it's own. The end result is that the
 > recipient of the bounce message (if there is one) doesn't understand what's
 > going on. If you generate a bounce, you have full control of what the
 > bounce recipient sees. For example, you could include an explanation of why
 > they should lobby their domain controller to publish SPF records.

Some mail servers add boilerplate text - sometimes accurate, sometime completely
inaccurate - to every inbound DSN.  How are you going to deal with that issue?
The fact is, you cannot control the operation of every mail server that might
handle your completely meaningful, easily understandable, and perfectly
hand-crafted 'bounce'.

-- 
Paul Russell, Senior Systems Administrator
OIT Messaging Services Team
University of Notre Dame
prussell at nd.edu