Re: [exim] listed at Backscatterer.org

On Tue, 29 Jun 2010, David Woodhouse wrote:

> > > --On 29 June 2010 10:51:00 +0100 David Woodhouse <dwmw2@???>
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > > > Users still won't bother to read them, and will prefer to ask a sysadmin
> > > > who will have read the words on the user's screen to them, before the
> > > > user actually understands.
> >
> > Some of those users have no interest in hearing the sysadmin read the
> > words to them or having an understanding of what they mean; they are
> > showing them to the sysadmin purely so that he'll do something to make the
> > problem go away.
>
> It's often a problem which is entirely outside the realm of the local
> sysadmin, though. It's almost always the _remote_ server which is
> failing to accept the mail.
>
> Occasionally that might be because of a local problem, such as being on
> a blacklist or lacking reverse DNS, that the local sysadmin can deal
> with. Mostly it's not though.

Oh of course, you and I know that, but the end user often doesn't. The
sysadmin is employed to "fix things", so once he's been shown the problem,
he's expected to toddle off and make the problem go away. Even when he
can't. (He'll probably get lumbered with the job of trying to find out
from the recipient site why the message wasn't rejected, or maybe he'll
take the cheap way out and tell the user to email from Google instead).

> > 1. all of your carefully crafted lines;
> > 2. the first line;
> > 3. the last line; or
> > 4. none of them, and to boot, an incorrect or misleading error message
> > resulting from invalid assumptions by the sending server.
>
> In cases 2-4, I suppose it _is_ correct for the users to bug their
> sysadmin, until such time as he/she fixes the mail server so that it
> _does_ correctly cite the SMTP error.

Yeah, when I receive such reports forwarded from sites having problems
sending to us, showing me only a partial of the multi-line response, I
always point out that the sending server is broken in not showing the
whole of the (helpful, informative) message. It doesn't do much good in
most cases though, as often times these are (yes, broken) commercial
products over which the sysadmin has no influence. It is easy for us to
say "replace it with something that works", but when that might cost
money, time, resource or skill that they don't have, they'll stick with
what they have that "mostly works", and grumble at end sites that cause
them problems.

In our community, we generally uphold values of "correctness" and
"strictness" reasonably highly, but that often doesn't play out in other
organisations and with vendors.

Jethro.

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Jethro R Binks
Computing Officer, IT Services, University Of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK