Re: [Exim] Exim setup done and it works ok, but...

Typing away merrily, Kalum Somaratna aka Grendel produced the immortal words:
> > If bounces had a more personal text, I am afraid more people would act
> > that way.

> This would not happen if it is made clear that the sender is *not* a
> human, Ie: a line like "as sincerely as software could be" will make
> things very clear to the recepient that this is *not* a human..

Muahahahaaaaaa ..... *rotfl*

You've not dealt with end-users very much, have you?

There's this thing called a bell-curve. Proportionally, there's not
many _really_ clueless ones, but the bigger the population sample, the
more people you have below a certain clueless threshold. Yes, that sort
of phrase makes it clear, but people _would_ still respond. Yes, those
people would have to be unbelievably daft.

0.001% of several tens of millions of people, is still a lot of people
with the ability to directly send you email, from all over the world.
And this doesn't even account for the people for whom English is not a
first language, and who don't understand the word 'sincerely' or the
'could be' clause.

More chatty bounce messages are a bad idea. The only things I'd
consider changing the bounce message for are:
* in a country where English is not the native language, put a
translation first (and leave the English in below as a common
language for mails from abroad)
* adding in an extra line beforehand, something like:
'*** MACHINE-GENERATED MAIL INDICATING A PROBLEM ***'

Designing a system designed to scale to more than 20 users and making
end-user competence a pre-requisite is perhaps not a good idea. Scaling
to more than 100 people and assuming intelligence above chimpanzee level
is foolhardy. Designing a system which should scale to the size of the
Internet population and _requiring_ the intelligence of a slug is going
to cause you serious grief if there's any way that error messages will
provide a way to contact you.
--
"We've got a patent on the conquering of a country through the use of force.
We believe in world peace through extortionate license fees." -Bluemeat