Re: Comments on Malformed Message BCP draft

On Apr 20, 2011, at 12:29 AM, Murray S. Kucherawy wrote:

> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Moore
>> Sent: Tuesday, April 19, 2011 9:25 PM
>> To: Charles Lindsey
>> Cc: [email protected]
>> Subject: Re: Comments on Malformed Message BCP draft
>> 
>> That's not to say that I want MSAs to forward thoroughly broken
>> messages; I don't.  But once a message leaves the MSA, I think the
>> opportunity to provide any kind of useful feedback to the submitter has
>> probably passed.
> 
> Where the MSA is under the control of someone that wants to exploit browser or MUA weaknesses, or doesn't care about standards as long as his/her crap gets to the inbox, doesn't that view of the world means there's no hope for improvement?

The only way I see to deal with these cases is for downstream relays or MXes to bounce or even drop malformed messages.  That will weed out those (hopefully few) MSAs.  

(Bouncing such messages won't get many users to change their MUAs.   But if their mail doesn't get through, they will change MSPs.  Many users have multiple email accounts anyway, and "resending from a different email address" is a common retry strategy.)

Keith