Re: [Exim] I wish HELO had never been thought of!

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Author: Giuliano Gavazzi
Date:  
To: Phil Chambers, exim-users
Subject: Re: [Exim] I wish HELO had never been thought of!
At 10:07 +0100 2003/05/16, Phil Chambers wrote:
>This is just a rant really!
>
>I wish the SMTP HELO/EHLO command had never been thought of, let
>alone introduced!
>If it did not exist then I would not be plagued by messages from
>people complaining
>that I am sending out spam and using headers like
>
> Received: from exeter.ac.uk ([64.174.206.89]) by imf41bis.bellsouth.net ...
>
>to justify it. (If you check you will see that 64.174.206.89 is
>nothing to do with
>exeter.ac.uk.)
>
>Given that we have HELO/EHLO then at lease mail server managers
>should have the good
>manners not to stamp messages with it like that!
>
>I presume everyone suffers from this, so can I encourage you all to
>complain to
>postmasters at sites who do this and ask them to re-configure their
>MTAs to use
>reverse IP addresses, not HELO/EHLO information?


what's the problem with the helo? With it people with no proper
reverse (like us now..) have at least the chance to set up a correct
A record pointing to their IP.
It is the fault of idiotic IT managers and users if they complain on
the basis of a fake helo.
On my server the message you reported would have been tagged (and
perhaps even rejected in presence of other irregularities..) on the
basis of rule 1

1: HELO dns consistency (PTR second level domain consistent with HELO
or A of HELO = ip address)

What I would ask is that mailservers' administrators took a bit more
care in the HELO and DNS setup of their domain, unlike btinternet
that has some servers HELOing with a host name ("plutonium" for
instance), and this is trapped by rule 2...

Giuliano
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