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Subject: Re: [OT] broken mailers (was: smtpd_banner without ESMTP)
From: Matthew Hawkins (matthewtopic.com.au)
Date: Thu Mar 09 2000 - 00:42:41 CST

On 2000-03-09 05:56:31 +0100, Matthias Andree wrote:
> So it's a matter of you telling them why their mail does not get
> through. "Their mailer is broken, fax them instead and tell them their
> mailer is broken." I cannot get messages out if the other side is not
> listening. The other way round, if an envelope of a letter is muddy
> beyond recognition, should a post office assistant (whatever his
> profession is actually called, I'm not a native speaker) NOT reject your
> registered letter?

This would work if it didn't take 19 months for the broken side to fix
their non-compliant mail systems. When it is one mail server (say,
ours) that is rejecting their mail but hundreds of thousands of M$
Ekchange servers accept it fine, guess who wins?

"Matt, we're rejecting mail from business clients. I don't give a shit
about security or internet standards, fix our mail server!!"

Now, if I've read my RFC's correctly, mail is transferred between two
servers, the sender will be listed as a MX for that domain and the
recipient is either the named system or the MX. A system listed as an
MX record will have both forward (as an A RR) and reverse (PTR) records.

Following internet standards is irrelevent, what it boils down to at the
end of the day is PHB 1 being able to talk to PHB 2 in the fastest time
possible. This will mean making _your_ mail server not reject mail from
non-compliant systems it should rightfully reject from. And 20 years
down the track the internet has fallen to pieces because the standards
that exist for compatibility are completely ignored, and the PHB's will
be wondering why they spend all that money on IT infrastructure that has
come to a dead end.

> Strange world, still.

s/Strange/Fucked\ up/ 

-- 
Matt            "...the only place for 63,000 bugs is a rain forest"