Our latest release 5.5 adds support for the RFC 3461 DSN extension, and published a guide on how to get started. At first glance it may seem like a very nifty feature, and one may wonder why it’s not just enabled by default. Fact it, the DNS extension comes with a few peculiarities which need to be considered.

In many email environments, the receiver has multiple store-and-forward MTAs before the message reaches the recipient’s inbox. Each MTA in the path has a different purpose, and may reject the message (if it is spam, for example) rather than deliver it forward. This is what requires MTAs to send “failed” DSN notifications; when an MTA which isn’t your first (edge) rejects a message. The sender always has to be notified as per the transaction safety requirement of email.

One of the features provided by the DSN extension is that you may also request “delivered” notifications by the last MTA before the recipient’s inbox (or “relayed” notifications by the last MTA supporting the DSN extension). This lets the sender know when and if the message was delivered.

Thinking about it, this feature may be nice to have enabled in your MTA for outbound email. It would let you or your users know if and when a message is delivered; rather than only notifying you when and if delivery fails.

If you implement this feature for inbound traffic however, it would be one of your own MTA that would have to send those notifications out to anyone on the Internet that requested them. The notifications would go out from the last MTA in your inbound path. When messages are processed and routed internally, additional information that should not be visible to the sender are sometimes added. Allowing the sender to request a notification possibly containing some of this possibly sensitive information might not be ideal. This concern has be raised many times before, for example in the Exim documentation

Note: Supplying success-DSN messages has been criticised on privacy grounds; it can leak details of internal forwarding.

During our implementation and testing we enabled success notifications for some of our outbound traffic, to see which mailbox providers send such notifications. We were quite surprised to learn that Microsoft includes quite a lot of information regarding the recipients in their success notifications. We instantly reported this to the MSRC team but it was rejected as not being an issue ?

Amongst those hundred of lines of X-MS- headers you receive in their success notifications, I’m not sure if the last login time of the recipient is necessary. This is in fact the actual time when the recipient (eg. user@hotmail.com) last checked their email:

X-MS-UserLastLogonTime: 10/1/2020 12:06:31 AM

Bottom line is; should you choose to implement this feature, make sure you do not add sensitive or unnecessary information to your success notifications that may expose your network internals or your customers’ personal information.