Re: [Nmh-workers] Updates to nmh

[Ken Hornstein]

>Actually, I'd find full MX'ing support a useful feature in nmh and most MUAs. 
>Today, there is no way to know that a mail has been delivered to the recipient
>, or a designated box of his choosing. You always have to send via a outgoing 
>mail relay of some sort. :-(
>
>An example, if you're in a legal discussion with someone (say complaining to 
>your online retailer), you want to make sure your messages are properly 
>received by the other party. The SMTP protocol provides just that guarantee, 
>you just have to make sure you connect and deliver to the right machine (i.e. 
>MX the recipient).

My comments on this:

a) It's not clear to me that performing final delivery constitutes "delivery"
   in a legal sense (let me put it this way: if I was on a jury where a
   verdict hinged on whether or not someone received a piece of email, and
   the only evidence was a valid sender SMTP transaction, I don't know how
   I would decide).  I mean, backup MX's alone complicate things.
b) There's already a framework for verifying delivery status: DSN (although
   it doesn't seem like support for that is as widespread as I though).
c) I think the battle in the ISP community has already been lost.

But if you really want to perform final delivery from nmh, there is always
the sendmail MTS.  That avoids having to implement a complete SMTP MTA
inside of nmh (which I'm assuming most people don't want).

--Ken