On Wed, 27 Aug 2003, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> [ On Wednesday, August 27, 2003 at 20:21:57 (+0100), Alan J. Flavell wrote: ]
> > It *can* be problematic: some misguided but otherwise bona fide hosts
> > treat rejection at HELO time as retryable.
>
> If you have evidence of any currently deployed mailer with such breakage
> then I'd love to read about it.
OK, maybe you have the better of me here. Could be that my
information is stale by now (but not _so_ very stale?). We were
certainly experiencing it occasionally when I posted this a year ago:
http://www.exim.org/mailman/htdig/exim-users/Week-of-Mon-20020902/043348.html
So I won't try to argue that point as such.
But in any case, in addition to the other point I mentioned, I forgot
to say that if you let them get to the RCPT stage then you can
(assuming that some proportion are misguided bona-fides rather than
all being spammers!) let them contact the postmaster to "discuss"
their problem, whereas if you kick them off at the HELO stage they
don't get that chance.
[There is, of course, a very special Hell reserved for spammers who
spam the postmaster address.]
cheers
