>> Out of an email exchange with someone in Germany came the
>> observation that exim apparently both does accept-and-bounce and
>> generates non-RFC3462 bounces.
> Exim will only normally accept-and-bounce if it's poorly configured,
> or in exceptional circumstances.
Oh, that's good to hear. (I guess the cases I see must be the
exceptional circumstances, or perhaps more likely botched
configurations. But of course I basically just never hear about the
many sites that don't do accept-and-bounce.)
> Besides, there are times when you _want_ it to accept-and-bounce,
> like when it's dealing with message submission from an MUA which
> can't deal with rejection.
Yes, that's entirely true; it's far more reasonable for mail received
as an MSA (vs an MTA). Even there, though, I'd be careful to bounce to
the user from whom it was received rather than to the envelope-from
address (which for all I know you may well already do - that is not a
criticism).
> RFC3462 bounces seem like a sane plan though. Got a patch?
No, unfortunately. I don't run exim myself.
The story, in brief: I ran into a German site that (a) did
accept-and-bounce, (b) didn't do 3462, and (c) rejected my reply to the
bounce (ie, mail to the From: address on the bounce) with a message
telling me my(!) software was broken. Someone from Germany tried to
mail me through it and failed, reached me by another channel, and in
talking about this site my correspondent said something like "I think
they use a modified exim - have you contacted the exim folks?". Upon
checking my own logs, I see that while exim bounces of forgeries are
not _common_, exactly, they are far from rare. So I thought I'd drop
you a line to put a bug in your ear about 3462.
Of course, even if you were to completely agree with me and rush to
implement RFC3462 bounces, it's not as if you can force anyone to use
the new version; this is not an attempt to cure the world's ills
tomorrow. Not even this one particular ill. Approaching you people
about it is a longer-term tack, trying to reduce the general level of
non-3462 (and thus non-machine-parseable) bounces (and thus the level
of such bounces I have to deal with).
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