David B Funk wrote:
On Fri, 20 Jul 2007, John Rudd "@ucsc.edu" wrote:
Jonas Eckerman wrote:
What do they think will happen when someone who doesn't know english
tries to send to a user of such a system that outputs english error
mesages that directs the sender to web pages with english instructions?
One possibility is, it could just spit out a url, with no other text,
and assume that the sender will understand that they're intended to view
the URL to find out why the message was rejected.
Umm, if -you- got a message that you didn't expect written in a language
that you couldn't read which contained a link, would you click on it?
That's not what will happen here.
What will happen here is that the sender's own system will generate the
error report, so it will be in that user's own system's language. If
they can't read the language used by their own mailadmin/ISP/etc., then
there's a larger issue here, and again an issue that is not specific to
this technology.
Within that message that we can safely assume is readable by the sender,
because it came from their own mail system, will be the one line SMTP
return code, which only has "5xx 5.y.y some://url". They will know that
this is the error returned by their intended recipient exactly because
that's what the rest of the message told them (in the languages their
ISP supports, because the message came from their ISP, and presumably
they understand their own ISP, or, again, we're back to a problem that
is not specifically the fault of this technology).
So, the real question here is not the one you asked. The real question is:
would you follow a url that is unknown to you, but clearly presented and
explained to you by your own ISP?"
And, if I had a reasonable browser (to protect me against anything
nefarious that might be in various web pages), and a reasonable mail
provider (which I do, since I run my own mail server at home, as well as
being the postmaster at work), then the answer is "if I knew it wasn't
spoofed, yes".
If you don't have a reasonable browser, then you shouldn't be clicking
on _ANY_ urls other than ones that go to web pages you wrote.
If you don't have a reasonable mail provider ... well, then, it doesn't
matter if you can read the message or not, does it?
It's hard enough trying to teach safe internet usage to our Lusers, now
I have to go and tell them "in this -one- particular case just do it"?
What you should be teaching them is to understand and analyze what's in
front of them. Encouraging them to _never_ pay attention to the
messages is just encouraging them to be lazy ignorant sheep instead of
energetic ignorant sheep. It's certainly easier to corral lazy ignorant
sheep than energetic ones, but the problem is still the "ignorant sheep"
part.
The willingly ignorant and lazy are hopeless. Just be sure you've lots
of firewalls up between you and them, because you can't really predict
what they're going to do no matter what inputs you give them.
If the site which rejected the message is multi-lingual, then they can
have the resulting webpage offer multiple translations.
If they're not multi-lingual, and only speak english, then there wasn't
any point in the non-english speaker trying to contact them, was there? :-)
OK, and the IT staff a some-big-name university speaks all the languages
that their constituents/visitors speak? I would be surprised if you
didn't have some people on your campus who couldn't speak English.
It doesn't matter. If they're contacting me, and I only speak english,
and they don't speak english, then there's no point in them directly
contacting me. It doesn't matter if they're on my campus or on Mars.
They will need to contact an intermediary.
And, as I pointed out, this isn't an issue that is specific to the
technology being discussed.
Though, I would also point out that it seems most such error messages
are in english anyway. But there's no necessity, in what's been
described so far, that the web page the URL leads to would be english only.
Do you mean to tell me that you've never gotten any "mailer-daemon"
messages from China, Russia, etc that you couldn't read?
From China or Russia? No.
I have received a VANISHINGLY SMALL number from spanish and german
speaking countries, however. Certainly not enough to threaten the claim
that "most such error messages are in english".
And, again, because it happens in the SMTP session between the sender's
ISP and the C/R using ISP, the error is most likely to come from the
sender's own ISP. Hopefully the sender is already able to communicate
with their own ISP in the ISP's supported languages.
