Re: [Exim] "You must say full HELO first" SMTP error

On 2000-10-06 at 17:00 +0100, Malcolm Beattie gifted us with:
> Maybe those four trailing spaces are preventing Exim from realising
> that the reply is a "502" and hence it's failing to fall back to HELO?
> A quick check of the source would confirm one way or the other.

Exim strips it. I was just noting it as an example of how horribly
broken that remote MTA is. Is it really worth your time, trying to find
a way to work around it instead of sending an explanation of the problem
to the local user and the responsible admin?

If I decide to learn Visual Basic, and write an MTA in that, but invent
new 4xx status codes, terminate lines with just \r, etc, does that mean
that every other mailadmin on the 'Net should ensure that they're
compatible with that software? (I don't touch Windows, this is
_entirely_ rhetorical).

At what point do you draw the line in the interoperability game?
--
Civilisation: where they cut down the trees and name streets after them.