This is the mail system
dewith.com
This is the mail system
1–10 of 80 posts
Re: This is the mail system
#2Yes, the email system could be better. But for something that was designed decades ago it works surprisingly well.
Should somebody try to do some smart parsing of failure notifications to make them more readable? Sure, I don't see why not. But don't pitch the baby out with the bathwater here. The underlying system is not that bad.
Re: This is the mail system
#3Its old, it doesn't look nice. But it is surprisingly reliable.
Re: This is the mail system
#4Status codes:
http://www.iana.org/assignments/smtp-enhanced-status-codes/s...
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3463
I'm guessing most e-mail client providers just haven't found a reason to prettify the responses. If anyone is up to the task, then can you explain PGP/GPG so the entire world can also understand and use that?
Re: This is the mail system
#5A lot of people prefer to look at actual error messages vs. a pretty face telling them, "Don't bother to learn what's actually going on here... let me iDumb this down for you."
Re: This is the mail system
#6I really like this idea.
You can apply this to every transactional email, not just to bounce messages.
Off the top of my head:
- Vacation auto-replies
- Receipts
- Error reports (ok, that might be a bit coding specific)
Re: This is the mail system
#7Please do no encourage admins to replace useful debugging output with useless HTML shiny.
But, by all means, improve the text itself.
Re: This is the mail system
#8What annoys me about SMTP is that it's poorly implemented. Have you tried sending a message to the postmaster at any large firm in recent years? Chances are nobody even reads that. I clicked on the link to submit a tip to my local news station last week; later I got a reply telling me that those mailboxes didn't exist. The largest broadcast media organization in the Bay Area can't even operate its own wesbite properly. So while SMTP is great on a technical level, it's only as good as the people who administrate it, and system administration is not as valued as it used to be because it's too labor-intensive.
Re: This is the mail system
#9Yes, the email system could be better. But for something that was designed decades ago it works surprisingly well. Should somebody try to do some smart parsing of failure notifications to make them more readable? Sure, I don't see why not. But don't pitch the baby out with the bathwater here. The underlying system is not that bad.
Actually, the underlying system is absolutely putrid, a sentiment that pg agrees with based on his latest talk at PyCon. Mail is, unequivocally, the worst part of my daily existence and you are kidding yourself if you're calling it "not that bad".
Using pg's words, mail is a to-do list that anybody can put shit on, and I don't have any control over who puts things on it. We live in an era of technology that can do e-mail so much better, and replacing it must happen in my lifetime. Everything, from the architecture to the messages themselves, need an overhaul. The extraneous shit we bolt on to e-mail (SPF, DKIM, PGP)...it's just making it a big, unwieldy mess.
Re: This is the mail system
#10Please do no encourage admins to replace useful debugging output with useless HTML shiny. But, by all means, improve the text itself.
What you call debugging output frequently isn't really debugging output - it's frequently a bunch of convoluted text that says 1 of 2 things, in 90% of cases: a) target email doesn't exist; b) your email was too large, dummy
The text can and should be improved and be void of HTML shiny - the mail client itself could parse the new, slimmer, standard error text and make it pleasing.