On Tue, 24 Feb 1998, Nigel Metheringham wrote:
> I have had a few examples of novice users being frightened by the mailed
> error messages sent out by exim.
Oh dear. I did try to make them more friendly that those I had seen from
other MTAs, but I suppose you can never make them simple enough for some
people.
> In particular the section starting "The following address(es) failed:"
> gives too much information, and confuses people.
It seemed to me to be sensible to keep the information with the
addresss, but if you say so...
> Its pretty cosmetic, but do people think this would help??
I guarantee you will still get users who say "I sent a message to
user@??? and I got a message from mailer-daemon@???
saying that the user did not exist. Surely there's a bug here, because
the local mailer-daemon can't know anything about users at the remote
domain."
On Tue, 24 Feb 1998, Eelco Vriezekolk wrote:
> I would like to have the error message simpler and friendlier, too.
> Ideally you would be able to provide a template error message for Exim
> to use, so that you could include, for example, contact details for your
> Helpdesk. That may be a bit too much work? Perhaps a single line of
> text could be made configurable (like in the Squid web cache).
Something like this is already on the Wish List, and in the light of
this thread I will try to do something for the next release (see below).
On Tue, 24 Feb 1998, Dave C. wrote:
> I wouldnt mind having something that made it easier for the
> bounce-detector I use with Majordomo to pick out what addresses failed.
> "X-Failed-Recipients" header or something...
Noted. Is this generally thought to be a good idea?
On Tue, 24 Feb 1998, Georg v.Zezschwitz wrote:
> Beneath considering how the message should look like that a
> novice understands it best, the existing (proposed?) standart
> "Delivery status notification" (DSN) as described by RFC 1891
> should be kept in mind.
>
> I don't know if this is the actual definition, but those DSNs look
> a bit different than the current messages.
>
> They seem to consist of MIME-messages with three parts:
Pardon me while I say "Yuk". MIME is great for sending binary stuff
around, but I find it a pain in the you-know-where when people sent me
little plain text attachments that I have to take special steps to read,
instead of just having all the text visible in the original message.
On 24 Feb 1998, Alistair Young wrote:
> On the subject, it may well have been mentioned before, but it would
> be nice to be able to return a customised message when you fail a
> message from the system message filter - just to clarify precisely why
> in case there is a legitimate sender on the other end, and maybe
> include the magic word.
Already implemented in the next release is a parameter to the "fail"
command, so you can do things like
fail text "This was failed because it looks like spam."
On Wed, 25 Feb 1998, Francisco Ruiz wrote:
> Another advantage, if we can write our own error messages we can translate
> them. This is one of our main problems (everybody doesn't speak english).
Indeed. That's one reason that's already on my Wish List.
PROPOSAL
--------
I will try to do the following things for the next release:
A) Add an option for a single string of text that Exim will insert into
error messages just after the line that says
This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.
so you could just add "Contact postmaster@xxx if you have problems", or
whatever.
B) Add an option to make Exim read a file containing alternative
paragraphs of text to use instead of the built-in paragraphs. This would
cover the case of foreign languages (though I would recommend having
English as well, for those error messages you send to other countries)
and you could adjust what it says to your taste. I could even make it
cater for the style of message that Nigel wants, and also arrange things
so that you could make it turn the message into MIME if you want to.
C) Add an X-Failed-Recipients: header to delivery error messages.
D) Add an option for adding arbitrary headers to delivery error
messages.
Comments?
--
Philip Hazel University Computing Service,
ph10@??? New Museums Site, Cambridge CB2 3QG,
P.Hazel@??? England. Phone: +44 1223 334714
--
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