On Mon, 17 Mar 2003, Dean Brooks wrote:
> > connect_treat_5xx_as_4xx
>
> What does the author of Exim think about this option at this point?
> Last I saw, his comments were that this was a bad idea.
Indeed, my view is that treating 5xx as 4xx is a bad idea. However, as a
purveyor of software, I sometimes have to implement things that I
disagree with if I want my software to be used widely. This is not the
first example of an option that I would never turn on myself.
> So far, I only see a couple of people who are wanting this unusual
> treatment. Wouldn't this possibly be better left to those individuals
> making their own patch and redistributing among themselves than adding
> this sort of stuff to the main distribution?
Possibly, but this particular case would only be a couple of lines of
code.
> If we are going to start treating specific error codes differently,
> I'd much rather see some generic way of specifying a result code tied
> to a specific ACL. Even then, I don't know how useful that would be.
This is on the Wish List, retained from the Exim 3 Wish List:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(46) 20-Oct-98 L SMTP protocol hooks
"But there are enough broken SMTP implementations to make me wonder whether
there isn't a case for providing hooks for tweaking the SMTP transport's
protocol exchange. Something which would allow me to say things like 'if, when
talking to lame.example.com, you get a 251 response to a MAIL command, rewrite
the response to 501 before continuing'."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It's never made it to the top of the list, and I too have my doubts as
to how useful it would be in practice.
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
