> -----Original Message-----
> From: Greg A. Woods [mailto:woods@most.weird.com]
> Perhaps not, but Exim's current design is what has made it
> possible for
> many _millions_ of domains to implement such a policy without a second
> thought or apparently even a stern warning.
It's actually requires a fair amount of knowledge to implement such a policy
by hand. There may be some kind of automatic tool that people are using
that creates these broken configurations, but it's hard to blame Exim for
that.
Do you also insist that car companies should produce cars that cannot exceed
25 mph, just to make sure no one will ever speed?
> And BTW, one of the related problems to this issue is the fact that it
> seems any and every random policy rule implementation results in one
> generic content-free and almost totally meaningless SMTP
> error message.
It doesn't have to. Exim provides a mechanism for including an informitive
message, though some people are apparently too lazy to set one. (And some
broken MTAs throw them away.)
> I.e. it is extremely counter-productive to allow admins to implement
> policies in such a way that errors are not returned until end-of-DATA.
This is the only reasonable way to do content-based rejections, e.g.
rejecting viruses.
