On Wed, 1 Dec 1999, Phillips, Alan wrote:
> Looking at some connectivity problems to hotmail we've been having for a few
> days (Exim 3.03), I noticed when forcing a delivery that most of their MX hosts
> advertise ESMTP, and respond to Exim's EHLO with "250 SIZE value"
The hotmail server is broken. The specification for the response to
EHLO, defined in RFC 1651 is:
4.3. Successful response
If the server SMTP implements and is able to perform the EHLO
command, it will return code 250. This indicates that both the
server and client SMTP are in the initial state, that is, there is no
transaction in progress and all state tables and buffers are cleared.
Normally, this response will be a multiline reply. Each line of the
response contains a keyword and, optionally, one or more parameters.
The syntax for a positive response, using the ABNF notation of [2],
is:
ehlo-ok-rsp ::= "250" domain [ SP greeting ] CR LF
/ ( "250-" domain [ SP greeting ] CR LF
*( "250-" ehlo-line CR LF )
"250" SP ehlo-line CR LF )
; the usual HELO chit-chat
greeting ::= 1*<any character other than CR or LF>
ehlo-line ::= ehlo-keyword *( SP ehlo-param )
Note that the first line of the response must contain the domain and a
greeting; the lines containing keywords such as SIZE follow. Your
session shows this:
> SMTP>> EHLO alliance.lancs.ac.uk
> SMTP<< 250 SIZE 1048576
with only one response line. Exim treats this as the greeting, and
therefore does not recognize it as a size specification. That is why it
doesn't add a SIZE option to its MAIL FROM command.
Sigh. I suppose I'll have to consider handling such broken servers.
Noted, but I'm not going to give this high priority.
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
