On Sat, 2004-05-29 at 13:40 +0100, Alan J. Flavell wrote:
> I'd like to raise the idea that, where such forwarded addresses no
> longer ever send mail, it would be good practice for mailers to only
> accept actual mail items, i.e items with a non-null envelope sender,
> when they are addressed to one of these old addresses; and should
> reject anything with a null envelope sender, on the grounds that there
> can be no valid delivery status notifications in relation to an
> address which no longer ever sends mail.
>
> Is this a generally good idea? Have others tried it, or something
> similar? Are there some knock-on effects which I'm missing?
interesting idea, but I don't think this policy could or should be
applied generally. it would be hard to write the ACL, too -- you don't
want this to happen if the user has more than one forward target, and
one of them is his local account.
I know we have many alumni who use the university address as their
invariant address as they move from job to job, and these people will
use the university address as the sender address, but forward all e-mail
to their current workplace. we also have a Notes installation, and it's
common for Notes users to forward e-mail into it, but the official
address points at our main Exim e-mail system.
so I think it would have to be configurable on a per-recipient basis.
and then you might as well implement return-path rewriting, and STRONGLY
suggest that people who's only forwarding and never use the e-mail
address for new e-mail, turn it on.
--
Kjetil T.
