>Don't change it. The banner should contain "200", the FQDN of the MTA,
>and an uninterpreted string (possibly useful for humans trying to debug
>problems). Mailers that modify their behaviour according to the presence
>or absence of some special text inside the part that is not supposed to be
>interpreted, might or might not lose (depending on how carefully they have
>been implemented). It's perfectly legal for an SMTP banner to include the
>text "ESMTP not spoken here" or "the following statement is false: ESMTP
>not spoken here".
You are a minority player in a sendmail Universe. Either adding ESMTP
to the banner or leaving it alone will have no effect on the rest of
the world unless you suddenly grow into a vastly larger segment of the
MTA market place, so that you can preach to a crowd that actually
listens to you.
My presumption is that sendmail added this policy due to mailers that
were barfing on initial EHLO lines. I recall that smail was running
into similar issues when ESMTP was first written for it. Given that
there is no standard a priori way of determining that a site will or
will not barf on an EHLO line, the implementers of sendmail must have
decided that this was the best they could do.
It is possible that all non-ESMTP MTAs have been modified, by this
point, to handle EHLO lines correctly (by returning an error and
staying around for a HELO line), but policies in computer programs
often move slowly.
--
Ronald S. Karr
tron |-<=>-| tron@???
