Re: ouch

Top Page
Delete this message
Reply to this message
Author: Philip Hazel
Date:  
To: Martin Hamilton, Chris Thompson, Martin Cooper
CC: exim-users
Subject: Re: ouch
On Fri, 11 Oct 1996, Martin Hamilton wrote:

> 220 Burleigh.lboro.ac.uk Simple Mail Transfer Service Ready
> Helo litterbug.lut.ac.uk
> 250 Unknown Command
> HELO litterbug.lut.ac.uk
> 250 Burleigh.lboro.ac.uk


Why should Exim pander to such incompetence? RFC 821 contains the following
paragraph:

Commands and replies are not case sensitive. That is, a command or
reply word may be upper case, lower case, or any mixture of upper and
lower case.

Somebody should point this out forcefully to the vendor.

On Fri, 11 Oct 1996, Chris Thompson wrote:

> I am still guessing... among other things this host does wrong is to
> fail to close the connection after QUIT - it seems happy to have another
> HELO afterwards!


... and this.

On Fri, 11 Oct 1996, Martin Cooper wrote:

> Hmm, I have wondered for a bit why Smail (presumably Exim does it
> because it's based loosely on Smail) refers to SMTP as smtp in
> "Received:" headers since it's an acronym, and why it uses those
> rather odd style message-ids that look like gibberish.


The names of Smail's protocols (and Exim's) are all lower case. The
message ids that Exim generates are not gibberish. If a message does not
already contain a Message-Id header, Exim adds one that consists of its
own unique id which identifies the message, plus the host name.

--
Philip Hazel                   University Computing Service,
ph10@???             New Museums Site, Cambridge CB2 3QG,
P.Hazel@???          England.  Phone: +44 1223 334714