Re: For exim sake! Re: [Exim] Reaction to rude 554 greeting

Greg A. Woods wrote:
> Quoting more of the RFC won't prove that you understand it and that
> you're not taking its ideas and claims out of context, as you so very
> clearly are in this thread.

Indeed. The way I see it is that you are making a decision on what
to do with an email, dependant on a protocol error message set by
remote postmaster. You do this without consulting him/her to see
WHY it gave that message.

What if the 554 is deliberate? By changing the behaviour you are
ignoring that systems policy, and are most likely to find yourself
ending up in their bad books and their policy toward you may even
become alot more 'facist' as you put it.

At the end of the day, before _consulting_ the remote administrator
to find out _why_ it is an issue for your SMTP traffic, my
interpretation of the RFC is that your only option is to bounce.
(After all what are bounces for but not to inform a sender that
a remote server is 'doing the wrong thing' or 'didnt like your
email' (amoungst lots of other reasons for bounces) ? :))

As to later in the thread somebody pointed out 'postmaster' could
not be contacted, if it cannot be done by SMTP, surely thats what
the contact address in the whois record is all about :)

Also, I note that Philip said that it's a one line patch. You could
argue either way that this doesn't mean a massive change for the
exim source and/or as a patch set. I personally would like to see
exim stay as near to RFC as possible; which to which so far Philip
has done a fantastic job.

I dont mean to offend anyone in the thread, and its nice to see that
people are discussing this like gentlemen :)

Regards

D.