[ On Thursday, June 26, 2003 at 14:31:43 (-0400), Wakko Warner wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [Exim] Exchange, HELO and underscores
>
> to these idiots. They don't care about standards or internet protocol, they
> only care about getting their business. I know, I work for such a company
> and I've not told them that such a workaround exists to allow an _ in helo.
I like the idea of giving individual broken senders a grace period, even
if they don't have to rebuild their server just to change it's name.
That's sometimes what I do (when the guys on the receiving end are
behaving like idiots too, just like you say).
You have to have the guts to actually pull the plug on them when you say
you will though, and remember to do it too! Don't just build up a stale
whitelist.
Remember no e-mail is actually lost when you block broken SMTP syntax,
so long as you do it before your server replies successfully to the
end-of-DATA command of course -- the sending side just gets it back in
the face, regardless of whether they can figure out what to do with it
at that point or not. If the idiots on the receiving end don't
understand that then they need to be clue-by-4'ed just as hard. You
can't "suck" business out of the ether -- on the Internet it has to make
its way to you and for that to work the transport media has to be
reliable at both ends. On the Internet there are usually at least two
separate parties involved in the making reliable of a e-mail transport,
and business people have to learn that they don't have just one party to
complain to when things don't work so well. It gets really fun when the
failure is actually caused by someone who's a competitor or similar.
--
Greg A. Woods
+1 416 218-0098; <g.a.woods@???>; <woods@???>
Planix, Inc. <woods@???>; VE3TCP; Secrets of the Weird <woods@???>