I want a secure web app, and allowing infinite email confirmations and re-sends seems insecure. I was thinking 3 but would love an opinion from someone with experience.
Edit
Sending email with Postmark and don’t want an attacker to burn through unlimited email credits. I also don’t want to spam my users if an attacker were to send a bunch of emails.
That said, I don’t want well-meaning users to not be able to re-send a confirmation. I was hoping someone would say “we use x number but upped it to x number and have had no more complaints.
Or maybe limiting this is stupid, for some other reason. I don’t know.
3
One should only resend once there is proof of delivery failure.
Some email providers use a period of time to attempt to deliver the email. A typical the default is 48 hours. Over this 48 hour period they may attempt to deliver the email N number of times, where N could be 8, 10, etc.
This is done to help on transient email errors. For example, what if the person’s inbox is full or thier service provider went down. All of these return specific errors, for example the SMTP service call will return a 422 if the mail box is full. A person could delete some of the mail and then that message would go through in that case on a subsequent attempt.
For a list of all codes, please see here:
http://www.serversmtp.com/en/smtp-error
For these types of errors, the provider would retry the message (automatically) again at a later period. Some returns are fatal, others may be classified as transient which may clear up after a period of time.
Finally after a period of time (say 48 hours) if the email is still not sent, they would report a delivery failure. At that point, the delivery is considered a failure and manual intervention would be required.
Only then would one want to attempt another confirmation or perhaps contact the user to see if the errors can be corrected.
The web application you are designing should take those factors into account when sending email.
2