On Sun, Dec 29, 2002 at 03:45:11PM +0000, Alan J. Flavell wrote:
> > At least one very unfortunate byproduct is that when I reject an Emamil
> > for bad HELO, or bad mail from at rcpt to time,
>
> Just for clarification - you're talking about issuing the 5xx for
> those causes at RCPT TO time, just like I mentioned earlier in the
> thread, I'm assuming?
That's correct.
> > stupid mailers/MTA
> > combos like outlook/exchange will say "user unknown", completely
> > ignoring the error message I sent back in 5xx
>
> It appears to be a microsoft speciality, that they are inclined to
> discard the real error message and construct some fiction of their own
Indeed.
Glad to hear that it's apparently limited to MS crap though.
> > Then, those people call me and ask me why _my_ mail doesn't work.
>
> Curiously, in my experience as deputy postmaster for the department,
> the most likely user response to any kind of failure to send us a mail
> is to try to send it again (maybe several times), to the same address
> and with the same cause of failure present, and then to give up.
That's probably happening too, but those I don't have to worry about :)
> But on the other hand, _most_ of the failures of this kind relate to
> attempted spams, so I reckon 'the spell is working', on balance.
Absolutely, that's why I have no problem leaving it in.
Overall it's both a spam and cluebie filter.
Marc
--
"A mouse is a device used to point at the xterm you want to type in" - A.S.R.
Microsoft is to operating systems & security ....
.... what McDonalds is to gourmet cooking
Home page: http://marc.merlins.org/ | Finger marc_f@??? for PGP key
