On Wed, 5 Mar 2003, Keith Moore wrote:
it's a pain in the wazoo to have to change your SMTP server every time
you connect to a different network.
There is something to this line of argument. However necessary the closing
of open relays is (and I agree that it is), none of the methods for
solving the roaming user problem is a easy as it should be. Authentication
(without plaintext password) is quite complex at the MTA, and not default
at the MUA. SMTP after POP is complex at the MTA, especially if POP and
SMTP occur on different servers. Some of this will cure itself in the
fullness of time, as these procedures become widely adopted. They don't
need to be hard.
I think a simple standard could eliminate the pain of changing smtp hosts
for each ISP used.
Isn't there an RFC that suggests "mail" as the hostname for the SMTP
server? I seem to remember that, but it is hard to search for such a
common word, and I can't find it now. In any case, if each ISP established
a CNAME of "mail" that accepted local mail for relay, users could just
put that in the smtp server field of their MUA, and could leave it
no matter what ISP they were connecting through. The resolver on
the personal computer would add the correct local domain. No protocol
change at all.
Of course, the ISP might need a lot of CNAMES, if it had lots
of subdomains, such as mail.ne.mediaone.net, mail.nw.mediaone.net, etc.
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