Victor Duchovni:
> On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 02:23:06PM -0400, Wietse Venema wrote:
>
> > Stephen Carville:
> > > FWIW, it looks like the copies of non-delivery notifications go to
> > > bounce_notice_recipient but the messages with the SMTP transactions
> > > go to error_notice_recipient. By setting these to different addresses
> > > I can separate the non-delivery notices from the error messages.
> >
> > Hmm. The postconf(5) documentation defines error_notice_recipient
> > and bounce_notice_recipient, but there is no clear specification
> > of when a specific errors is reported.
> >
> > Right now, the Postfix SMTP server reports a "bounce" error when
> >
> > - The content is rejected by header/body checks or smtpd_proxy_filter.
> > - The message hop-count exceeds some limit (mail loop error).
> > - User unknown in xxx table (long ago, caused by typing errors).
> >
> > The Postfix SMTP server reports most access checks as a "policy" error.
> >
> > As to why these choices were made, they were not written down, and they
> > were made 10 or more years ago.
>
> I would argue that perhaps the 3 cases above should all be "policy"
> errors too. Largely because "bounce" notifications really should be
> about mail already in the queue, and these don't seem to fit...
It is hard to imagine, but the initial settings (user unknown and
bad hopcount) made sense when losing mail was a bigger concern than
receiving spam. Email reached its peak reliability before 2000.
Wietse
