550339 - Recognize undeliverable email responses and handle nicely

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, enhancement)

Description

[Susurrus]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6
Build Identifier: 

Currently when a user sends an email to an invalid email address, they usually get a response from some mail daemon that the message couldn't be delivered because of some reason.

I propose that these messages be automatically recognized by Thunderbird and parsed into a nicely-formatted error message to display to the user. I see this work as something along the lines of the current 404 error page work being done for Firefox, though email doesn't have nice error codes.

Right now if a user gets this message they need to read it to determine what's wrong, and these messages aren't very readable, dig up the sent message, open it as a new one and resend, possibly excluding recipients who already received it just fine. This is really a PITA.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Nathan Tuggy (:tuggyne)]

Unfortunately, I don't know of any standards that apply to this. And looking at the headers of a recent sample I received (actually, earlier today) doesn't make it look all that promising for automated processing either.

For this to work properly, there would need to be samples of messages representing a substantial percentage of MTAs attached to this bug, showing the commonality that the code would exploit to do its thing -- almost certainly heuristics. Obviously, messages that didn't match the heuristics would be displayed normally, but if Thunderbird isn't able to recognize at least 50% (and probably more like 85%) of automated messages, it would be difficult to justify including the code.

Alternatively, if someone wanted to make an extension, that would likely have a much easier time getting traction; updated heuristics could be released every month or two, as necessary, and feedback gained from that, and after a while the extension could be folded into Thunderbird, if it's useful enough. (I searched AMO, but found nothing that looked very promising, with the possible exception of an extension that tracks DSN and MDN responses; this may or may not be related, though.)

[I think this should perhaps be in MailNews | MIME, but that seems like a funny place to put it. It should at least be somewhere in MailNews, though.]

Comment 2

[Susurrus]

In regards to recognizing bounced messages, I would imagine the addition of header fields to a bounced message would solve that problem. Bugzilla adds extra headers for emails it sends out already. While this requires work on mail daemons, producing something akin to a standard for this this would make the most sense. Heuristics would probably work fine for now, but if this gets into the software side of things, it'd make things much easier.

Comment 3

[Raphaël Fairise]

As part of the Trustedbird project, we've developed an add-on for Thunderbird which identifies and displays the status of pending and received notifications for messages sent with notification requests (MDN and DSN).

http://www.trustedbird.org/tb/Notification_Viewer