Re: [Asrg] Adding a spam button to MUAs

Steve Atkins <steve@blighty.com> Fri, 05 February 2010 20:07 UTC

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From: Steve Atkins <steve@blighty.com>
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Subject: Re: [Asrg] Adding a spam button to MUAs
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On Feb 5, 2010, at 12:01 PM, Chris Lewis wrote:

> Steve Atkins wrote:
> 
>> Of those, the only thing that's actually associated with the inbound mailbox is the incoming mail server.
> 
> As you suggest, key it to "feedback@feedback.<incoming server name>".

Yup.

> 
>>> But a critical bit of UI design is that it should be clear to the user whether something will happen, or not. So for this to be workable the MUA needs to be able to configure itself to show or hide the TiS button (or grey it out, or whatever UI idiom you like).
>> The charm of using an MX record to configure this is that the MUA can do an MX lookup to know whether to show or hide the button. That's pretty clean, and if I were coding an MUA I'd be happy to do it that way, but it's not necessarily a _trivial_ thing to add to a codebase, especially via plugin, so it's worth considering.
> 
> From the perspective of code base, checking for an A record for "feedback.<incoming server name>" would be simpler.  The MTA doesn't need to use DNS to deliver, and you really don't want the MUA to be establishing direct connections anyway.  Fixed route to whereever in the MTA.

So an A record for feedback.imap.example.com to demonstrate existence, and an MX record for the same to actually control delivery.

So the MUA can lookup the A record for feedback.imap.example.com to enable the TiS button, and when the TiS button is pressed it just sends email, using it's normal submission server, to feedback@feedback.imap.example.com or something like that, and the smarthost delivers that just as it would any other email.

If the MUA checks for the A record when fetching mail, rather than when displaying it, it'll all work when I'm on a plane too. Yay for store-and-forward!

Cheers,
  Steve