RE: [Exim] Exim 4.02 new "feature"

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Author: Jeffrey Wheat
Date:  
To: dana_booth, exim-users
Subject: RE: [Exim] Exim 4.02 new "feature"
Dana,

    I agree with your view entirely. However, in light of that, I have customers that are unable to get their corporate offices to change their hostnames (doing so requires a reinstall of things like SQL server, exchange, etc.). So, not being willing to lose a customer that spends thousands of dollars a month, I had to accept emails from these broken sites. Had I not done so, my competition would have gladly picked them up and changed their MTA. I am not the only company that had to bite the bullet and break RFC's because of Microsoft not complying with the RFCs.


Jeffrey

-----Original Message-----
From: dana_booth [mailto:maullin@guns.ru]
Sent: Wednesday, March 27, 2002 10:56 AM
To: exim-users@???
Subject: [Exim] Exim 4.02 new "feature"


There must've been requests to make it easier to allow non-compliance in Exim, specifically, allowing non-compliant characters in host/domain names.

As more and more small and medium size companies come online, Microsoft has made it easier for them to manage their own mail without the benefit of a normal sysadmin. As usual, though, when Microsoft breaks the rules, everyone else is expected to alter their own behavior to comply with Microsoft's non-compliance.

However... In this particular instance, (the implementation of MTA software) Microsoft is still in the minority. I'm begging you guys, please don't start allowing underscores or other illegal host/domain name characters just because you have a reject log full of Microsoft hits. There must be a way to make this more public; to force those who "administer" Microsoft software to come into compliance.

From RFC2821:

----snip
To promote interoperability and consistent with long-standing guidance about conservative use of the DNS in naming and applications (e.g., see section 2.3.1 of the base DNS document, RFC1035 [22]), characters outside the set of alphas, digits, and hyphen MUST NOT appear in domain name labels for SMTP clients or servers. In particular, the underscore character is not permitted. SMTP servers that receive a command in which invalid character codes have been employed, and for which there are no other reasons for rejection, MUST reject that command with a 501 response. ----snip



SMTP servers that receive a command in which invalid character codes have been employed.... MUST reject that command



--
dana_booth <maullin@???>

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