RE: [Exim] use of _ in HELO... again

Wakko Warner
> Subject: [Exim] use of _ in HELO... again
>
>
> I've run into a problem where I've been told by management to
> break the RFCs and allow the use of _ in an HELO.
>
> I sent them the relative RFCs about this. They came back
> with "RFCs aren't standards". The people we're having
> problems with have more problems. (checked their domain
> through dnsreport.com)
>
> Anyone have any thoughts of how to combat stupid management?

I ran into this with a division which had a lot of clout and who basically
told us that they were unable to correct their applications because....

o They had been working as they have for more than 2-1/2 years already so
what was the big deal.
o They had too many other things to work on right now.
o The change was too hard and should be put on hold until after the split
has occurred...
o Insert just about any other excuse they wanted to put forward, simply
because they didn't want to mess with it and up until this point, they would
have easily won any argument like this in the past. I was even told by an
upper management person "Good Luck" when he heard what I was trying to
accomplish...

This was causing me problems because I didn't want to allow broken headers
in a new system and up until a day or two ago, I didn't know how to get
around the problem...

I did however come up with a polite, politically correct and to the point
method of combating this however...

The current outbreaks of viruses did the trick for me. I pointed out to
management that though the use of checking for valid headers, we were able
to significantly reduce the number of attempted injections of viruses into
the network which would reduce greatly the amount of mail that spent time in
virus checking and in some cases eliminated any virus problem at all. Many
viruses use syntactically invalid headers... Double Dashes in the time zone
is a good example, inbound IP's without valid rDNS is another.

The amount of time being spent combating viruses lately has been a big red
flag to management. With as big a company we are, it is a huge problem
that some divisions have still not conquered yet with a number of key
personnel being pulled away from separation projects to deal with the
issues.

We are not complaining about broken HELO's however. Just the rest of the
headers. But I think you could make the argument the same way. Something
that I might try after the split when we are much smaller and our resources
will be much more limited.