◅ okay, what _can't_ sendmail do?
bug-of-the-month club redivivus ▻
violation of "be liberal in what you accept" considered harmful
In article <4am9c4$9l0@hustle.rahul.net>, Rahul Dhesi <dhesi@rahul.net> wrote: >There were a few domains that would not accept incoming mail if they >didn't like the format of the MAIL FROM: address. [...] >Rejecting incoming mail thus might be a well-meaning attempt to force >more sites to send strict RFC822 headers, [...] You've lost me. If a receiver-SMTP rejects the SMTP (RFC 821) `MAIL FROM' command it hasn't seen any RFC 822 headers. In my opinion, the ability to reject bogus envelope originator addresses is the second most important way in which SMTP is technically superior to X.400 and UUCP. It should be exploited to the full: the "black holes" created by a receiver-SMTP accepting originator addresses to which it cannot route back, are a major cause of user frustration and the perceived unreliability of mail. [ Anyway, it's not a violation of the Robustness Principle, since the receiver-SMTP is *sending* the 5xx reply code, and must therefore be conservative :-) :-). ] Tim. -- Tim Goodwin | "Repeat after me: naming and addressing are Unipalm PIPEX | completely independent." -- Barry Margolin
Original headers:
From: tim@pipex.net (Tim Goodwin) Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail Subject: Re: violation of "be liberal in what you accept" considered harmful Date: 21 Dec 1995 13:34:29 GMT Organization: Unipalm PIPEX Message-ID: <4bbnp5$gqf@wave.news.pipex.net>