[Mailman-Developers] suggested improvement for Mailman's bounce processing

[Ian Eiloart]

--On 8 August 2006 05:13:37 -0500 Brad Knowles <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org> 
wrote:

> At 10:56 AM +0100 2006-08-08, Ian Eiloart wrote:
>
>>>  Right, but if we can't fix the problem of the multitude of broken
>>>  MTAs out there, and the fact that most of them probably don't assign
>>>  the appropriate extended response codes in accordance with the RFCs,
>>>  then the likelihood is that we are going to be lead to make the wrong
>>>  guesses based on the response we get.
>>
>>  We already do that. This is the problem that we're trying to solve, not
>>  a new problem introduced by the proposal!
>
> No, that's precisely the problem -- the proposal does cause new problems
> that have to be dealt with.

Well, that's not true if the new default behaviour is the current broken 
behaviour. Would you accept that?

> Because of all the broken MTAs out there, I believe that the probability
> is high that we will be unable to guess correctly what type of bounce we
> have for a statistically significant subsection of the population, and
> that the potential consequences of either a false negative or a false
> positive in this case are higher than taking the K.I.S.S. approach and
> not making any attempt to guess what type of bounce we're dealing with.
>
>
> So, feel free to go ahead and make this change and to put this entire
> issue to rest, at least for the data you've collected from your site.



-- 
Ian Eiloart
IT Services, University of Sussex