Re: [Exim] What does this error mean?

On Mon, 30 Sep 2002, Torsten Mueller wrote:

> > I'm not sure what benefit we get by rewarding admins who misconfigure
> > their servers.

[...]

> There's no benefit. But the number of hosts with underscores is
> simply too high to ignore them completely.

We have three IP addresses listed in helo_accept_junk_hosts
(you'll understand my reasons for not saying which they are ;-)

Two of them are there because they behaved so badly when they got 5xx
to their broken HELO that they had to be allowed to proceed to the
RCPT TO stage, at which point we reject them because they're RBLed.

The third is a sending system which had a long enough lever that we
had no choice but to accept their broken HELOs.

But any new broken sender who turns up will, at least, have to
experience some difficulties before they can get any further.

Reviewing the logs, I would say that the overwhelming majority of
broken senders were people we didn't want to hear from anyway.

> The fact, that a helo_allow_chars option exists, reflects this too.

Unfortunately, as I say, the use of that option effectively rewards
sloppy server administration. Next along that slope you'll be
required to allow dollar signs, or white spaces - here's a real
cracker of a HELO that we just turned down:

rejected HELO from sw59-240-216.adsl.seed.net.tw [61.59.240.216]:
syntactically invalid argument(s): Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000

cheers