On 20030221 (Fri) at 2220:03 +0000, Tim Jackson wrote:
> The answer is in your post. Read Exim's (quite verbose) message again:
>
> > all relevant MX records point to non-existent hosts or (invalidly) to IP
> > addresses
>
> @ IN MX 0 209.239.13.194
>
> instead of (for example) something like:
>
> @ IN MX <pri> mail
> mail IN A 209.239.13.194
>
> Therefore, puremetal.com do not have any valid MX records and in the
> absence of them, Exim can't really do anything useful with the message.
> If it's important, you could call them (puremetal.com) up and ask them to
> fix their DNS. But you'll find if they actually like receiving e-mail,
> they'll probably fix it soon enough anyway when they don't receive half
> the mails they should.
This is one aspect of a problem that has plagued me for years. My
employer manufactures and sells stuff. My users want to be able to
receive email from, and successfully send email to, our business
partners and our customers, no matter how ignorant and/or stupid their
IT people might be (many small firms can't afford real IT people in the
first place, and some engineer or salesman looks after the servers in
his very limited spare time). It's not an unreasonable desire. I
hacked smail3, when I was using that, to disable a lot of verification.
Now that I've switched to exim 4, I'm still finding out about, and
turning on, stuff like helo_accept_junk_hosts and helo_allow_chars, to
cope with messed-up and misnamed exchange servers and so forth. It
would be nice to get the customers to fix their messes, but it's not
good for business to tell customers they've cocked up.
IMHO it ought to be possible to configure one's MTA to try harder to
find a way through, even if that involves connecting to an IP address
that doesn't have a reverse map at all.
--
| G r e g L o u i s | gpg public key: |
| http://www.bgl.nu/~glouis | finger greg@??? |
| Help free our mailboxes. Include |
| http://wecanstopspam.org in your signature. |
