Kai MacTane wrote:
> At 4/24/2000 04:17 PM -0400, Adam McKenna wrote or quoted:
>
> >Your apparent standpoint in this conversation, up until this paragraph, was
> >that qmail (or internet mail in general) is lacking some feature that you
> >want implemented:
> >[snip]
> >You've been answered with (for the most part) "We think things are OK the
> >way they are, use queuelifetime if you want to change qmail's behavior"
>
> As a contrasting view, I see things roughly thus:
>
> As things stand with qmail right now, a user sending mail through qmail
> gets one of three things:
>
> 1) A successful delivery.
> 2) A bounce message (liable to happen within a few minutes under most
> circumstances).
> 3) An eventual failure (which takes queuelifetime).
you forgot the possibility of
4) Message gets totally lost and NO-ONE gets any warning...
this can happen for many reasons. from entering the wrong e-mail address
accidentally and whoever gets it ignores/deletes it, to the server failing and
losing the message. this was my point earlier, you can't always count on
getting an error message if there is an error, because there's _always_ a
chance that the message will be lost without a trace. so if you do make errors
for everything possible, then users who don't know how the system works will
assume than _every_ error will return an error message which just can never be
the case. the only way to make the system foolproof that I can think of is by
implementing some kind of automatic return reciepts built into to the MUA.
have it automatically request a reciept whenever a message is sent, and
whenever a reciept is recieved flag that message as "recieved" otherwise flag
the message as "in transit". the problem with this is both ends have to
support it for it to work properly, but this would do 2 things - instantly
educate the user that the system's not infallable, and solve your need for
error messages.
-Brian
