Re^2: Exim, for the love of Perl

in reply to Re: Exim, for the love of Perl
in thread Which MTA is best to use with Perl....

On the other hand, using SMTP for sending makes it downright convenient to return an informative error message to the user (and logs, hopefully) if the connection is refused or relaying denied.

Using a "keep and retry" mechanism could mislead the user into thinking that the mail has been sent and presumed delivered, when in fact it hasn't. If you're in some sort of corporate environment, warm up your support ear! ;-)

Comment on Re^2: Exim, for the love of Perl

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Re^3: Exim, for the love of Perl by Anonymous Monk on Jan 25, 2005 at 09:36 UTC
I assume your SMTP solution is going to deliver all mail to a "smart host", and isn't going to do MX resolving itself, and deliver the mail to one of the servers returned. In that case, if you get a "relaying denied" error, you have a serious problem - it basically means all you may be able to do send mail to local users. Your error message should have been "this solution is never ever going to work". If the user gets a "connection refused" message, he'll be pissed. He doesn't want a "connection refused" message from an MTA. He wants the MTA to queue the mail and retry again. That's the task of the MTA - not the task of the user. This problem was solved more than 30 years ago. If you just fill in a correct return address errors, not only the error message will be send to the user, the mail as sent will be returned as well, even if there's a problem (like 'relaying denied') further down the line.	[reply]

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Re^3: Exim, for the love of Perl
by Anonymous Monk on Jan 25, 2005 at 09:36 UTC

I assume your SMTP solution is going to deliver all mail to a "smart host", and isn't going to do MX resolving itself, and deliver the mail to one of the servers returned. In that case, if you get a "relaying denied" error, you have a serious problem - it basically means all you may be able to do send mail to local users. Your error message should have been "this solution is never ever going to work".
If the user gets a "connection refused" message, he'll be pissed. He doesn't want a "connection refused" message from an MTA. He wants the MTA to queue the mail and retry again. That's the task of the MTA - not the task of the user. This problem was solved more than 30 years ago.
If you just fill in a correct return address errors, not only the error message will be send to the user, the mail as sent will be returned as well, even if there's a problem (like 'relaying denied') further down the line.

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