On Wed, 25 Feb 1998, Philip Hazel 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.
As a point of information, Sendmail error messages were sometimes cryptic and
in the case of delivery problems to mailing lists, often downright misleading.
Secretaries would often come to me asking to explain what the error messages
meant. Ever since switching to Exim, I have not had a single complaint
regarding error messages and our user community is very satisfied with the
service they are receiving from Exim (in particular with regard to the marked
reduction of spam e-mail).
>> "Delivery status notification" (DSN) as described by RFC 1891
>> should be kept in mind.
>>
>> 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.
Hear! Hear! In particular when you have N MUA's on M architectures
and only K can do anything with MIME (K << N*M).
If Exim eventually does support RFC 1891, I hope that the plaintext
error message format is kept as an option since this greatly simplifies
things for our user community.
With regard to the language question, I am not an ISP and all my users
are required (as part as their studies' prerequisites) to have a good
reading-level knowledge of English and, hence, I do not require error
messages in Hebrew. Moreover, we often have visiting faculty and graduate
students from countries worldwide and English is the lowest-common-denominator.
> 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."
Great. This is just what I need to send messages back in my system filter
without having to use an explicit 'mail' command.
___________________________________________________________________________
Ephraim Silverberg, CS System Group, Phone number: 972-2-6585521
Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. Fax number: 972-2-6585439
WWW: http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~ephraim E-mail: ephraim@???
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