Recently I have been spending more time than I would have wished contacting
remote postmasters to get defunct or non-existent accounts removed from
mailing lists. The delivery error messages that we return to the SMTP sender
(usually owner-<something>@<somewhere>) often seem to be ignored, and it
takes this sort of hassling to get the list entry removed.
When I get through to the (putatively) human being in charge of the list,
I sometimes get replies like "I've removed such-and-such@??? from
the mailing list, but it would save you and us trouble if your mail system
generated error messages in standard format, because then the unsubscribing
would happen automatically". These references to "standard format" do not
mention any RFC... :-)
Are there are any standards worthy of the name in this context? Or failing
that, any useful rules of thumb? The message text we currently send (via
an Exim pipe transport) is
Your mail to $LOCAL_PART@$DOMAIN was not delivered because that user no
longer has an account on this system.
for the first few months after cancellation, and after that, or for accounts
which have never existed,
Your message to ${LOCAL_PART}@??? has not been delivered, because
"${LOCAL_PART}" is not a known user mailbox on this system. User mailbox
names consist of the user's initials, usually followed by a number
of digits, starting with a digit greater than 0 (some older, 4-letter
names have no digits). A common error is to confuse the digits "1" and
"0" with the letters "l" and "o"; please check to see that you have
not made this mistake.
followed by the results of a fuzzy matching search, and a URL reference
for looking up ...@cam.ac.uk addresses. That is, it is all oriented at
a human recipient.
Chris Thompson Cambridge University Computing Service,
Email: cet1@??? New Museums Site, Cambridge CB2 3QG,
Phone: +44 1223 334715 United Kingdom.
