[ On Wednesday, November 8, 2000 at 08:18:39 (-0500), Dave C. wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [Exim] sender_verify, lookuphost MX and A records
>
> I don't really consider that people are refusing, just that they are
> ignorant, and there really is no officla way to tell 'everybody' to
> require MX records.
It's been "official" for almost two DECADES (sans RFC 974's *temporary*
workaround that was intended only as a stop-gap measure while sites got
"up to speed" on this new-fangled fancy thing called DNS).
However there are definitely people who flat-out refuse to add even a
few sensible MX records to their DNS, including at least one reasonably
large .EDU site in the States, if they see that things will continue to
work (from their point of view) without them.
I personally still, after all these years, believe that if the
work-arounds hadn't been entombed in RFC 1123 that we'd have fixed all
of this stuff at least 6-8 years ago (i.e. before the Internet got big
and commercial). The work-arounds didn't have to be sanctified in any
RFC because they were already implemented in practice. The RFC should
have only published the ideal state to which everyone would strive to
work towards. Instead now it's used as an excuse for doing a half-baked
job.
> Too many software developers dont read the RFC's,
> or misinterpret them.
Yup, but at least a few of them can be educated and hopefully the rest
(eg. Lotus, L-Soft, M$, etc.) will eventually lose enough market share
that someone will educate them one way or another (not that there's all
that much market share left after sendmail to go around! :-).
> Too many nonqualified persons get shoved into
> sysadmin and dont have a clue, and set it up wrongly..
This is quite true. However I don't even have the time of day for the
latter such idiots any more. Either they fix their systems or their
mail bounces (or never gets delivered). Period. Someday they'll be
pushed aside by some smart young wipper-snapper who has figured out that
one simple tweak of the DNS will fix all their problems at once.
> Unfortunately, there are more of 'them' then there are of 'us'. And its
> hard enough as an ISP explaining to a customer that they can't mail to
> a domain that has an IP address in its MX target, which is a fairly
> infrequent occasion. It would be quite infeasible to try and explain to
> a huge pile of customers why all of a sudden they can't mail certain
> domains becuase we now require MX records.
For the odd ISP site that I help administer we continue to implement
RFC-974 for sending, but are pushing more and more into requiring MX
records on sender address domains for receiving because this way any
complaints are more likely to be directed at the other end and any that
make it our way can be brushed off with a "we can't do anything to fix
it because we're not reponsible for the broken parts."
Of course we still get half-smart users who realise that they can still
get e-mail from those correspondents on broken domains at their hotmail
(or whatever) account and so they still complain to us about someone
else's problems, but that's usually only because they're an order of
magnitude smarter than their correpsondents who can't figure out to
complain to the postmaster/hostmaster at their end and instead complain
directly to the person they're trying to send e-mail to.
At this point we've only lost customers who were costing us way more in
support costs than they could ever hope to pay us back in profits, and
that's exactly what you want to do anyway -- tell the losers to get lost
and go eat into someone else's profit margin!
--
Greg A. Woods
+1 416 218-0098 VE3TCP <gwoods@???> <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods@???>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@???>
