[Pymilter] Too harsh?

[Todd Lyons]

On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 4:03 PM, Stuart D. Gathman <stuart at bmsi.com> wrote:
>
> The important feature that I am working on is having a web page URL
> will a full explanation referenced in rejections, like AOL does.

Ours is at http://postmaster.ivenue.com.  However it does not
reference the newly implemented sender reputation system.

It's only running on the new system anyway, we have an older sendmail
based system and a new exim based system.  The exim version was easy
to code up.  The miltered version is not so easy.  You probably will
chuckle when you read this next sentence:  I had forgotten that a
milter cannot see headers that other milters have added.  So any
attempt to create a reputation milter that does not also handle the
spam scoring will have to just log profusely and rely on some external
process to parse the logs and submit the feedback.  I will probably
use swatch for that, or maybe write a simple helper daemon that does
pretty much what swatch does.  I haven't thought too much on that just
yet.

> So pretty much only one line will get to the end user.  Some systems

My rejection message is pretty straightforward:
Sender reputation poor, retry sending later
282bf15886012068508968657d08940e,-76,1

But when I am in debug mode checking things out, that message wraps
into two lines right before the hash, so chances are the only thing
they will see is the sentence.  The full log message is:

2010-03-04 23:29:57 H=220-130-152-172.hinet-ip.hinet.net
(ts100-e5.yotor.com.tw) [220.130.152.172] F=<bestaiwan at dnb.com>
temporarily rejected RCPT <REDACTED at mail.minimot.com.tw>: Sender
reputation poor, retry sending later
282bf15886012068508968657d08940e,-76,1

> give them the first line, some give them the last line.  Hence
> this is why AOL sends exactly one line with an URL.

Yes, I am a big fan of the way that AOL's system operates.  Our
postmaster page was originally inspired by AOL's postmaster pages,
with one obvious exception that mine is woefully web 1.0 and AOL's
looks beautiful :-).  I was saddened to see them let go of so many
people last month, and even more saddened that Analivia has moved on.
But being the only one left has a completely demoralizing effect and
to me it was only a matter of time before Analivia left too (having
had the exact same scenario thrust upon me in the past, it only took a
couple months before I found another job I was interested in and moved
on).

-- 
Regards...      Todd
I seek the truth...it is only persistence in self-delusion and
ignorance that does harm.  -- Marcus Aurealius