Final Delivery Status

Checole

Member
Jun 7, 2021
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The Proxmox features highlists list the
  • Status of final delivery
of the "innovative Proxmox Message Tracking Center".

What is really meant by status "delivered"


  • Does the confirmation come from the recipient’s mail server?
  • Does this mean that the recipient’s mail server has accepted the sent email and delivered it to Employee A’s mailbox?
  • Can the tracking log be interpreted unambiguously to mean that the email has arrived at Employee A and that they can become aware of it?
  • Can the tracking logs be stored in a way that is audit-proof/revision-safe?

 
What is really meant by status "delivered"

  • Does the confirmation come from the recipient’s mail server?
yes - a status of delivered means that the receiving mailserver sent a 2xx code (meaning it accepts the mail for delivery) when PMG tried to send the mail

  • Does this mean that the recipient’s mail server has accepted the sent email and delivered it to Employee A’s mailbox?
  • Can the tracking log be interpreted unambiguously to mean that the email has arrived at Employee A and that they can become aware of it?
no for both questions - in general a mail-server only knows if the receiving mail-server accepted the message - not if it's further delivery succeeded.
there are some RFCs which specify ways how to automatically notify a sender that a message was received by the recipient, but those are not provided on the public internet in most cases (to not disclose too much information). Some mechanisms exist where the recipient can actively acknowledge receiving a message - request return receipt - but it depends on the recipient to actively say they want to sent that information.

Can the tracking logs be stored in a way that is audit-proof/revision-safe?
The tracking center takes its information from /var/log/syslog and its rotated variants - those get written by rsyslog, and are regular Linux syslog files - you can use any technique that store syslogs in an audit-proof/revision-safe way .

I hope this helps!