Re: [EXIM] Negation in domain/host/net/address lists

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Author: Philip Hazel
Date:  
To: exim-users
Subject: Re: [EXIM] Negation in domain/host/net/address lists
One more issue on which I'd like opinions, please. When I collapse an
(accept,reject,reject_except) group of options down into a single
option, there is a choice of whether that option should be an accept
option or a reject option. I see the following opposing arguments:

(1) Always use accept options. Thus everything is always an "access"
list and you have uniformity.

(2) Some options are used as reject lists 99% of the time. For example,
sender_reject. It is more natural to specify them that way. It would be
tedious to have to remember to insert ! in front of every component of
such a list. Also the name sender_reject_recipients makes more sense
than sender_accept_recipients (which I have never liked). (However, I am
also considering abolishing the distinction between these two options,
and just rejecting at RCPT time in all cases.)

But what about sender_host_reject and sender_host_accept? In this case,
I think both "accept lists" and "reject lists" are used, but again
sender_host_accept_recipients is a silly name, and I don't think the
distinction should be abolished here because rejecting at connection
time and at RCPT time are two different facilities.

I have changed my mind several times, but at the moment I am favouring
(2) because sender_reject and sender_host_reject are in fairly wide use,
and we might as well try to avoid unnecessary incompatibility.

OTOH, maybe we could rename the options as

  sender_host_accept             - rejections happen at RCPT time
  sender_host_accept_connection  - rejections happen at connection time


since the latter is possibly rarer. (Or that could be done using
"reject" names.) Hmm. Am I starting to change my mind again? Help!


-- 
Philip Hazel            University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@???      Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.



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