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

[Brad Knowles]

At 4:44 PM +0100 2006-08-08, Ian Eiloart wrote:

>  But, the idea is NOT to try to parse bounce *messages*, it's to parse
>  bounce *codes*.

Here's the deal.

You think it's going to be trivially easy to add this new feature, 
and to parse the codes correctly, with the correct outcome, all you 
have to do is follow the RFC and everything will be hunky-dory.

I think that the problem is a lot more complex than that, with many 
sites giving totally inappapropriate response codes for the real 
underlying reason, and trying to parse them is likely to cause more 
problems than it solves.  Moreover, I think this is going to add 
unneeded complexity to the system for what I believe will be, at 
best, relatively minimal benefit.  Worse, in order to adhere to the 
spirit of this idea and make the concept actually work, we'll have to 
get into trying to parse the actual wording of the error messages, 
and then we'll have to get into internationalization issues of all 
those words we're trying to parse, because I'm pretty sure that words 
like "virus" are not the same in Polish, Chinese, Farsi, and whatever 
other various languages we have to support.


So, here's the solution.  You go implement the code to do what you're 
talking about, and see how it works on your site.  Make sure to 
collect all the bounce messages in question, and the action that was 
taken by the system.  This way, we humans can compare the performance 
of your new code.  Once you're done tweaking the system to work as 
well as you can manage, come back to us and show us your code and 
your input data, and prove to us how well it works.

But without a patch and a strong indication that this is a 
significant improvement for relatively little added complexity, I 
don't think you're going to get any further traction in this issue.


That's it.  I've said my piece.  Unless you have something new to add 
to the discussion, I'd suggest you do us all a favour and let this 
drop.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

  Founding Individual Sponsor of LOPSA.  See <http://www.lopsa.org/>.