Re: bounce, mta, & mua (was Re: sieve draft)

[Tim Showalter <tjs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 4 Nov 1997, Bart Schaefer wrote:

> } On Sun, 3 Nov 1996, Tomas Fasth wrote:
> } 
> } Rationale: I don't understand the difference between MTA and MUA filtering.
> 
> I see two differences:
> 
> 1.  An MTA may not have access to all the UA's mailboxes.
> 
> 2.  An MUA can't reject/reroute at the transport protocol level.

Ok; I never considered SMTP-level filtering seriously.  Which is why there's
an implicit assumption that the agent has the entire message.

> The significant difference is that, even if the envelope sender in the
> Return-Path is correct, the POP3 client has no access to the envelope
> *recipients*.  In an ideal world, that makes little difference, because
> every recipient has his own POP3 maildrop.  In the real world, POP3 drops
> are sometimes overloaded to delivery messages to an entire domain, e.g.
> as a "replacement" for UUCP.
> 
> Of course, there's little the Seive language can do about that, except
> to make it easier for the ISP in such situations to provide server-side
> filtering.

How do sites like this handle mailing lists, BCCs, and the like?

Should Sieve handle this?  (I don't want to, but should it?)

> } Would making "bounce" optional help?
> 
> I don't think so.  One could still construct and send a DSN using other
> seive tools, so making it optional just makes it more difficult to do
> the action, not impossible.

OK; I was suggesting this as a policy choice as much as a technichal choice.

-- 
                                           Tim Showalter tjs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx