Re: Delivery Notifications in SMTP

[Steve Kille <[e-mail]>]

Erik,

From a user perspective, I sympathise with what you are trying to do
here.  However,  I am not convinced that it is right.

The DR mapping in 1327 has two objectives to achieve.  

1) Present the user information to the end RFC 822 user.

2) Ensure that key diagnostic information is not lost.   Throwing away
information in the mapping is very very bad news.   Some fields are
often so much cruft, but sometimes the information is key to
disgnosing a problem.

987 got this badly wrong, a we found out when we started to deploy
it.  1148 chooses a copromise.  There is a user-oriented description
of the problem at the front, followed by a fully mapped and parseable
representation of the DR.  I had hoped that 822 UAs in the mixed
environment would be adapted to strip out the machine oriented format
(it is triv to do this, and will be even easier in the next update
which will use MIME to separate the bits), so that the user would only
see the user-oreinted bit, but the machine oriented bit would be preserved.


I think that unless the new 822 format is designed with gatewaying in
mind, it is unlikely that an upgraded 1327 would be able to use it
effectively.



RNs (IPNs) seem to be a non-issue in 822.   This is primarily because
you can't request them.  I believe that there are some environments
where they will be very valuable.   Lets not prejudge them from an
environment which cannot properly support them.



Steve