Re: [exim] customizing 451 host lookup did not complete

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Author: WJCarpenter
Date:  
To: Exim Mailing List
Subject: Re: [exim] customizing 451 host lookup did not complete

>>> Some MUAs are sloppy and don't tell me who the bad recipient is when
>>> they get bad news after RCPT TO:. Thus, I don't know which of
>>>
>>>
>> For exactly that reason, I don't do any rejection at RCPT TO level for
>> MUAs.
>>
> Yep, what he said. Essentially, for MUA submissions, don't reject at ACL
> time and instead let the routers generate a bounce instead.
>


I appreciate your thinking, but I don't agree with it. It seems a bit
extreme just for overcoming this one little problem in Exim (which is
easily worked around 98% of the time with the method I described). If
you accept anything from an MUA, you get some undesirable usability
problems:


1. It can take a short time for the user to see the bounce (for
example, if they poll for new messages every 10 minutes). That's too
bad for someone who sends a message and then heads out the door.


2. If I send a message to 5 recipients and 1 of them is bad, 4 people
will get a message with a bad recipient in the headers. When they
reply, they'll get rejections or bounces. It's subjective, but I think
most people would like the chance to correct a bad address before the
message goes to the others.


Granted, these things can still occur even with recipient checking, but
why not handled the cases that can be caught?