To Include Altered Addresses in Status Notification Messages

Keywords: includefinal, suppressfinal, useintermediate

When the MTA generates a notification message (bounce message, delivery receipt message, and so on), there may be both an “original” form of a recipient address and an altered “final” form of that recipient address available to the MTA. The MTA always includes the original form (assuming it is present) in the notification message, because that is the form that the recipient of the notification message (the sender of the original message, which the notification message concerns) is most likely to recognize.

The includefinal and suppressfinal channel keywords control whether the MTA also includes the final form of the address. Suppressing the inclusion of the final form of the address may be of interest to sites that are “hiding” their internal mailbox names from external view. Such sites may prefer that only the original, “external” form of address be included in status notification messages. includefinal is the default and includes the final form of the recipient address. suppressfinal causes the MTA to suppress the final address form, if an original address form is present, from status notification messages.

The useintermediate keyword uses an intermediate form of the address produced after list expansion, but prior to user mailbox name generation. If this information isn’t available, the final form is used.