Variable Envelope Return Path - Disadvantages

Disadvantages

The use of VERP requires each message to be sent once for every recipient, instead of once to each receiving SMTP server. This is because of a limitation of SMTP, which allows multiple recipient addresses to be specified in a single transaction, but only one sender address. When there are many subscribers in the same domain, a mailing list that is not using VERP can combine multiple deliveries into a single transaction. It connects to the appropriate server for the domain, gives the single sender address, the recipient addresses, and then sends the message contents only once.

A mailing list using VERP, on the other hand, must send the entire message body repeatedly, which leads to an overall increase in bandwidth usage. This inefficiency is usually not considered a big problem, especially by qmail users, since qmail always sends messages once per recipient, even when VERP is not being used. Some packages mitigate the impact of VERP by applying it selectively, for example a mailing list manager might only use VERP on 1 in 10 mailings. This way you can gain much of VERP's tight bounce control and accurate feedback without incurring the processing and network overhead every time.

Another problem with VERP (and with any automatic bounce handling scheme) is that there will always be some recalcitrant MTAs on the Internet that fail to follow even the simplest standards. VERP depends on the recipients' MTAs following the rule that bounces are sent to the envelope sender. This has been a standard requirement since the dawn of SMTP in 1982 (see RFC 821), but still there are MTAs that get it wrong, usually by bouncing to the address in the From: header (See Imail for an example).

Systems that implement greylisting work fine with VERP if the envelope sender follows the above mentioned format. However, some VERP implementations use message number or random key as part of VERP, which causes each post to the mailing list to be delayed unless the greylisting system treats "similar" sender addresses as being equivalent.