Autor: Alan J. Flavell Data: A: Hanasaki JiJi CC: exim-users Assumpte: Re: [Exim] MTA presents bad HELO but won't take 'no' for an answer
On Thu, 5 Sep 2002, Hanasaki JiJi wrote:
> Great diagnostics if you are debugging a client side program, and
> therefore, maybe too much info togive out. Thoughts?
Well, they would get essentially the same diagnostic from exim at HELO
time, in the absence of the configuration adjustment that we're
discussing on this thread. The point of this particular workaround is
to deal with a few MTAs which treat 5xx at HELO time as being
temporary, retryable, errors. By deferring the 5xx until RCPT TO
time, we can get them off our back.
Your point is otherwise well taken, but one has to draw a compromise
between helping bona fide but misguided senders, and not helping
spammers too much.
As discussed recently here, I wouldn't want to offer spammers a public
service for cleaning their address lists. But if they don't know that
putting $ in a HELO name is bad for one's health, they're going to
learn it from somebody anyway. I don't see any great benefit in
secrecy about that, to be honest.