[ On Wednesday, August 27, 2003 at 21:57:19 (+0100), Alan J. Flavell wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [Exim] exim HELO ack
>
> 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
You didn't give any concrete examples of the mailers involved then
either. ;-)
Were the rejected hosts you mentioned using 8-bit chars, or just
underscores?
But in any case the problem's not really a problem if they hold off for
some reasonable amount of time like 10-15 minutes and if it's only a
very few hosts, then it's their problem, not yours! ;-)
The real problems were with a few odd and now very old mailers (early
versions of Netscape's mail server were one such example) which retried
the connect right away, sometimes with multiple simultaneous attemps if
they had multiple messages to send, and which would not give up for days
on end. Of course ever since implementing error response rate limiting
I've not even had to worry about the remaining few these that may still
be hiding out there in the woodwork....
Eventually the sender will get a bounce, and even if the bounce doesn't
identify the true cause of the problem it will hopefully prod someone to
look into what's really wrong.
> 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.]
Indeed, spam to the postmaster aliases I'm on is a lot more common in my
experience these days than peers which ignore 5xx errors from HELO.
If any postmaster doesn't have one or more alternate accounts on
other mailers then they probably don't deserve to contact me by e-mail! :-)
If any real postmaster can't telnet to my mailer port and manage to
manualy send me at least a short message asking for help then I don't
really want their e-mail in the first place. (and if they do know how
to speak SMTP via telnet then they'll see the whole error message and
they'll eventually see what works and what doesn't)
If on top of all of the above they don't have a phone, and can't send a
postcard by snail mail, and yet they're still not willing to just fix
their mailer's hostname (after obviously having been given a very nice
explanitory message about what's wrong), then I don't really have the
time of day for them in any case.
After all -- it's their user(s) trying to send e-mail to my user(s), not
the other way around! ;-)
--
Greg A. Woods
+1 416 218-0098 VE3TCP RoboHack <woods@???>
Planix, Inc. <woods@???> Secrets of the Weird <woods@???>
