Ron White wrote on Sat, 24 Apr 2010 07:34:42 +0100.
> Given that the core purpose of Exim (or any mail 'server') is to
> facilitate legitimate communication I question the value of that logic
> for someone running a business. Personally I'm happy to accept paid work
> from folk that email me using Outlook et al, but your server your rules.
I disagree. The purpose of Exim and all the other mail servers is to
exchange mail. 'legitimate communication' has never been a design
criteria. Its just 'communications' - good or bad - with the wonderful
options in Exim of rejecting the bad.
If someone from the UK government down emails us, we expect and we
always seem to get, a 'To:' header (which started this topic) in every
arriving email.
> It may have a place in trivial and hobby systems for geek observation,
> but in the real world where people rely on email for communication your
> logic is, in my opinion, seriously flawed.
If anything is flawed, in my personal opinion, it is the implementation
of permitting emails to be sent without a 'To:' header.
> Why not go the whole hog and have your server reject all connections
> 'out of hours' - say so it only accepts mail between 9-5 as well ;-)
Because it is always 9-5 (presumably 09:00 to 17:00 and not 21:00 to
05:00) somewhere in the world. Some companies and organisations start
sending emails as early as 07:00 in their local time zone.
Rather than encouraging anarchy, we hope our modest - and in our opinion
sensible - policy of rejecting arriving emails without all of these
headers:
To:
From:
Subject:
Date:
Message-ID:
will (and does in our experience) reduce spam.
So far the only emails caught by this strict criteria have come from
.vn, .cn, .in and .br and not one single genuine email except from one
sender to this Exim mailing list.
Regards,
Paul.
--
