On Mon, 27 Apr 1998, Philip Hazel wrote:
> On Mon, 20 Apr 1998, Ben Loyall wrote:
>
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > 1998-04-20 20:29:22 rejected HELO from [209.96.179.164]: syntactically
> > invalid argument(s): ppp:tbarstow
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> <unprintable comment suppressed>
:) hehe Trust me, I uttered much the same when we found this problem.
>
> I made 1.90 accept underscores in HELO arguments because Microsoft puts
> them there. (There's an option to be more strict.) I didn't provide
> anything for allowing through other characters.
>
> > a) Pegasus has a command line switch that will let you force a valid
> > hostname
>
> One wonders why the default is to be invalid. Sigh.
>
>From what we have been able to dig on this one, I can not blame Pegasus
for this. It seems to be clearly coming from Micro$oft's OS.
Here is what we found:
If a MS Win95 machine has no other networking components installed at the
time Dialup Networking is first used to make a connection, Win95 will grab
the username from the DUN connectiod, and make that its hostname. If the
username is later changed, it still keeps the first one. The only way we
have found to clear it is to install MS networking, and set the hostname
via the Indentification tab in the Network control pannel.
Not fun for the techdesk
> > I'm hoping there is a way to disable this syntax check for a netlist as
> > that is much less painful than 3300 phone calls.
>
> You could patch the code, around line 290 of smtp_in.c.
>
> Another Sigh. I suppose I'd better consider putting in an option to
> allow through any old junk.
>
Actually, I did find another way (although the patch might be more
elegant). I wrote a bit o'perl that rips through the reject log and mails
each user whose gets rejected a note explaining the problem and describes
the fixes and points them to a URL for more info.
Thanks to all those who responded.
Ben Loyall
Postmaster & more
widomaker.com
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