Wietse Venema wrote:
Daniel L. Miller:
Wietse Venema wrote:
Postfix reports enhanced status codes (5.1.1 means the mailbox does
not exist, etc.) in standardized non-delivery notifications. See RFC
3463 for an overview.
Mail user agents can translate these standardized status codes into
user-friendly text. There are good reasons why these translations
should be done in MUAs (primarily, the recipient of the DSN may be
in a different language zone than the MTA that sends it).
Getting closer. I may be using the wrong vocabulary - part of my lack
of understanding of the SMTP protocol.
My understanding is a MUA (for convenience, call it Thunderbird) will
talk to a local MTA (Postfix, of course!) to send mail. After
authentication and any other local checks, the local MTA accepts
responsibility for the message - the MUA disconnects. The local MTA
then attempts to send the message to the remote MTA. If
successful...unless there's something else I don't know about, nothing
further happens between the local MTA and MUA. If unsuccessful, and
idiot OP's like me don't have soft_bounce enabled, the MTA will generate
a bounce message and send it to the sender's address, and cancel the send.
If the above is anywhere near reality - then where is the interaction
between MUA and MTA for the bounce message status codes? I'm seeing an
SMTP connection for the initial send operation, followed by a message
retrieval by the mail reader (which doesn't necessarily have to be the
same program that sent the message originally). Is the mail reader
supposed to locate the "enhanced status code" in the message body and
translate it?
--
Daniel
