Subject: Re: Delivery Status Notification (DSN) ?

From: [email-masked] (Greg Andrews)
Date: Thu, 17 Apr 1997 19:29:47 GMT

David L Miller <[email-masked]> writes:
>On 14 Apr 1997, Vikas Agnihotri wrote:
>
>>  Has some kind of standard been reached upon how MTAs are supposed to do
>> Delivery Status Notification (DSN)? I remember reading something about this a
>> few months back but didnt see any follow-ups on www.imc.org or anywhere else.
>
>Yes, there is an Internet (proposed) standard for DSN.  Recent
>versions of Sendmail implement it and Pine 4.00 will support it. 
>

I take it the demand at washington.edu is large for this proposed
standard?

  -Greg
-- 
:::::::::::::::::::  Greg Andrews  [email-masked]  :::::::::::::::::::
Fortune Cookie:  Radioactive cats have 18 half-lives.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

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From: [email-masked] (Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho)
Date: Thu, 17 Apr 1997 07:49:58 GMT

David L Miller <[email-masked]> wrote in comp.mail.misc:

>The last I heard, Qmail does not support DSN [Dan,
>can you confirm that?]

I installed qmail on my not-connected machine [that's why you
haven't seen my success note, Dan] about a week ago. While
waiting for the ugly makefile to finish its work I read
Bernstein's thoughts included in the distribution. From what I
read, I conclude that DSN won't be supported for a while by
qmail. A shame...

	Antti-Juhani

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From: [email-masked] (Leslie Mikesell)
Date: 22 Apr 1997 12:34:49 -0500

In article <[email-masked]>,
D. J. Bernstein <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
>In article <[email-masked]>, Leslie Mikesell <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> If you are trying to notify someone on the road about a meeting change,
>> etc. it is nice to know that the message made it as far as their
>> laptop.
>
>Well, the de jure standards don't help you here.

Yes, it is just curious that the standards have lagged so far behind
commercial needs and availability, almost as though someone had a
vested interest in keeping standards based mailers from being
suitable for business use.  My current system had an adequate
mechanism for a good 10 years with per-recipient requests in header
lines that are just ignored by other mailers. 

>To get the job done with qmail, simply set up an appropriate qreceipt
>invocation in ~/.qmail on the laptop, and have the sender put the right
>address into N-R-U-D-T. As soon as the message is delivered (e.g., via
>fetchmail), qreceipt will generate a success notice, which will be sent
>out immediately.

Errr, the remote systems are running Ms-windows, msdos, and I think
there is a mac or two somewhere.  I really need to have it done as
the remote client grabs the message via POP or IMAP.

>If the POP mailbox is also on a qmail machine, you can set up qreceipt
>there too. Then the sender can ask for a receipt for delivery to the POP
>box or a receipt for delivery to the laptop. Or both.

In this situation it only makes sense to generate the notification as
it is picked up from the POP box since the receiver is most likely
to go off-line before anything else happens.  The situation would
be a bit more ambiguous with IMAP but still you know if the client
machine has the message.  Do any POP/IMAP servers know about N-R-U-D-T?

Les Mikesell
  [email-masked]