On 20030222 (Sat) at 1724:34 +0200, Willie Viljoen wrote:
> On Saturday 22 February 2003 15:38, Greg Louis wrote:
> > 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 disagree.
>
> Remember, simply because you have adapted your MTA to tolerate this, other
> people's MTA just might not. Infact, most experienced administrators will
> enforce the rules strictly. While it may seem unreasonable to force
> everybody to follow the same rules, I think it's alot more unrealistic a
> demand to want everybody to lower their standards and "bend the rules" to
> accomodate one company's misconfigured server.
You mistake my position, although I think you have a good point.
At home, where I can make decisions and take consequences, I operate a
quite strict MTA.
At work, where other people's welfare and that of the company depend on
the flow of email, I cannot afford to be pedantic and purist, whether
or not I would like to.
It does nobody any good for the users to discover that a
correspondent's mail is reaching "everyone else but us."
Every administrator has the right to set up his or her environment as
they see fit, and take the consequences. What I want is the ability to
tolerate just about every mess elsewhere -- receive mail from
misconfigured sites and deliver mail to misconfigured sites -- but have
our own behaviour, both as sender and as recipient of mail, strictly
correct in every other way.
> Simply adapting your server to be liberal with your customers' servers might
> make you seem to be flexible, which is always a good thing, but it
> certainly won't fix their problem in the larger scheme of things.
It is not my duty -- I would say it is none of my business -- to get in
anyone else's face about how well or badly they set up their
environment.
> This is not an exagiration, a set of public blacklists exist at
> rfc-ignorant.org, which are used as a shared source of information
> regarding misconfigured servers and domains, which are blatantly blocked by
> all users of the lists. This means that if your customers are trying to do
> business with somebody who uses such a list, they might well find
> themselves being treated in the same way that most companies treat
> spammers, simply because they didn't take the time to configure their
> server properly.
If the users of such lists choose to deprive themselves of the ability
to communicate with such hosts as do not meet their standards, that is
their decision and their right. Our need is the exact opposite: to
communicate with anyone who wishes to contact us.
> > 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.
> Actually, it is. We find that sending their IT person/people a nice e-mail
> (or a fax, if no e-mail is getting through at all) explaining to them what
> the problem is, and citing reasons for the regulation from an authoritative
> document like an RFC or an Internet Draft will always get their attention.
> I even offer to come and help them fix the problem, at a price, ofcourse.
You live in a different business world from the one I inhabit. We do
not criticize our customers' networking skills any more than we would
their body odour. I do sometimes address network issues with business
partners, if I know they have the ability to understand and the
motivation to examine my submission -- not with customers.
> You are entitled to your opinion, but the fact of the matter is that MTAs
> which allow users to, as it were, get away with anything, just add to the
> increasing flagrant disregard for regulations and standards that is causing
> most of the serious problems on the internet today.
I cannot afford to put my employer at a disadvantage by restricting
communication to those customers (few in number) who show appropriate
enlightenment. You may be sure our competitors indulge in no such
idealism.
> Problems should be solved, not managed.
You would also plow your car into people whose driving skills are
unsatisfactory, on the basis that such folk have no place on the road,
right? (The analogy isn't that bad: you hurt them, you improve the
road for others, and in all likelihood you do yourself considerable
damage in the process -- that's what you're asking of me.)
--
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