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>