进行SMTP连接测试的REST API发生故障时的HTTP状态代码

Question

What should be right http status code which we should use in REST response for an API which does SMTP configuration test and send test mail for failure scenario like SMTP configuration is not correct or Authentication Issue with smtp server etc.

Any suggestions.

Answer 1

I would suggest returning 200 OK with a message about failure in response body or header. If you put it 400 (BAD_REQUEST) or some other error code, you wouldn't know if the service was down or there was something else wrong with the code, which caused the bad response.

If you do want to check the service availability, I'd suggest 417 (expectation failed)

Answer 2

Not a big expert of SMTP but I would suggest you to google for the list of SMTP status and then map those SMTP status to HTTP status code . Most of the time for HTTP status, you have 3 main categories grouped by status code (ranges):

• 200 for good execution
• 400 for user errors
• 500 for server errors

I don't really know if there is a relation between SMTP and HTTP code status. In this case it is your own choice to choose which status code you will map together, and then return the good HTTP code result.