At 10:49 AM +0100 2006-08-09, Ian Eiloart wrote:
Rubbish. The codes are numbers.
Right. But, as I said, the codes aren't going to be sufficient. They're going to be misleading in many cases, causing us to make inappropriate conclusions based on faulty information. Therefore, if you want to uphold the spirit of what you're asking for, you're going to have to look deeper and try to start parsing the actual text of the bounce message to try to better understand what the real reason was. And that way lies madness.
Otherwise, RFC-1893 would have been sufficient to answer all possible questions about this feature, and all MTA authors and all mail systems administrators would have been able to perfectly follow those guidelines. We wouldn't have needed RFC 3463, or the updates from RFCs 3886, 4468, etc....
The fact that there was some perceived ambiguity lead to confusion and inappropriate implementation, and incompatibility. Which lead to newer RFCs being written on this subject in order to try to clarify the situation and hopefully lead to greater compatibility. Unfortunately, there's still lots of old code and old installations out there, and they are unable or unwilling to upgrade, so now you've got all this legacy code you're saddled with, along with all this new code as well.
So, if you build your parser to handle exclusively RFC 4468 codes, and someone has written or implemented an MTA using codes from 1893 that they misinterpreted, you're probably going to have a hard time figuring out what they meant and why.
Keep in mind that you're not only fighting MTA authors here, but also the vast majority of clueless MTA administrators that take a recommended configuration from someone else that is likely to be wrong and apply it inappropriately at their site, and thus perpetuate and worsen the problem far beyond the level of damage that MTA authors would ever possibly be capable of -- and MTA authors are capable of screwing up a whole lot of stuff.
So, show me a parser that fully understands all possible correct interpretations of these RFCs, plus all possible incorrect but likely interpretations of these RFCs, and we might have something useful to talk about.
-- Brad Knowles, <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org>
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755Founding Individual Sponsor of LOPSA. See <http://www.lopsa.org/>.