Re: [Exim] AOL - SPF - and EXIM

On Thu, 10 Jun 2004, Bruce Richardson wrote:

> And it doesn't say "MUST NOT reject at the EHLO stage", it says "MUST
> NOT refuse to accept a message" which means that those of us who reject
> at RCPT TO because of something in the HELO greeting are being naughty.

However, it refers several times to mail being rejected for "policy"
reasons, without even attempting to throw light on what those policy
reasons might be.

If I decided to couple the HELO test with some other factor - a factor
that was almost certain to be "true" for the kind of mails that we
want to reject on policy grounds, then we could say that we were
following the letter of the RFC, while still using the HELO domain as
one of the factors in our rejection policy.

> No matter. I am not going to stop rejecting incoming mail that puts our
> domain name in the HELO parameter. The RFC really needs to be updated.

The effect would be short-term anyway. If substantial amounts of spam
were being rejected on the grounds of bad HELO domain - then the
spammers would simply stop doing it. The rejection method only works
for us because we're in a minority, is the truth of the matter, I'm
afraid. Doesn't mean I'm not going to use it as long as it seems to
be useful, though.