

Issuance of a DSN upon delivery failure is the default behavior, whereas issuance of a DSN upon successful delivery requires a specific request from the sender. Specifically, the DSN SMTP service is used to request indications of successful delivery or delivery failure (in the DSN format) be returned. DSN is both a service that may optionally be provided by Message Transfer Agents (MTAs) using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), or a message format used to return indications of message delivery to the sender of the message.
