--On 26 March 2008 05:18:44 +0900 "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org> wrote:
Eino Tuominen writes:
You are missing the point. Of course you can inform of a delivery problem, but only when you really need to do it. Every organisation should know of every recipient within their authority. You should know the recipient if you accept a message for delivery from outside your domain.
Says who? There is nothing in the standards that says so. And if you take that seriously, you have to disable .forward and procmail for individual users, as well as refuse to allow open subscription mailing lists and the like. This may make sense in the U.S. Army and in corporations with a military authority structure, but it does not in most universities, research, or open communities.
No, that's not true. I have about 10,000 users here. They have access to .forward files, but only a handful have worked out how to use them. Actually, we let them set auto-replies but only after the email has passed a very strict spamassassin threshold, and its rate limited, and its only for personal email (To and CC: recipents, no list headers, etc).
We do have open subscription mailing lists.
What we don't do is bounce emails with bad recipient addresses.
That is *not* the way Internet mail is designed to work. Mail, like every other application on the Internet, is intended to be decentralized. It is designed to allow load-sharing by use of intermediate and/or secondary MXes to handle primary crashes or overloads.
Yes, but they need to have equal access to user databases.
-- Ian Eiloart IT Services, University of Sussex x3148