From: Kee Hinckley <nazgul(_at_)somewhere(_dot_)com>
In fact the sendmail milter interface generally gives sufficient
information for per-user rules during the SMTP transaction. That's
I wasn't trying to single out milter's specifically.
I misunderstood your words to be unambiguously asserting that the
milter mechanism does not include the end user identity.
What we've
discussed, over and over, is the fact that you can't always know the
final recipient at the time of receipt (even though you may know it's
a valid address). I don't see the need for us to go into it over and
over again.
...
.forward's were one thing. The other is a standard system where the
gateway mail system is outside of the firewall, but additional
delivery is done inside the firewall.
We have agreed is that as people configure and run STMP servers for
various good and bad reasons, an SMTP server may not know the final
address and so may have problems doing proper spam filtering.
However, that fact does not imply that filtering cannot be done before
the end of the SMTP transaction or that it is not best done then.
You seem to be asserting to the contrary that filtering must or should
be done primarily during final delivery. We certainly have not agreed
on that, although there have been some recent statements by others in
support of that view.
That fact also does not conflict with the fact that most filtering
could be done during the STMP transaction given perhaps onerous efforts
to synchronize user databases, whitelists, logs, and so forth among
SMTP servers.
I suspect that most filtering today does not need any synchronizing
among SMTP servers but could be done during the SMTP transaction given
appropriate filtering software. For example, it sounds as if the
SpamAssassin milters need work.
None of that implies that additional filtering during final delivery
cannot or must not be done.
But anyway. I'm just don't see that this conversation is generating
anything except heat.
An IETF/IRTF working group mailing list is not like netnews or SPAM-L.
It is not merely a forum for stating positions and exchanging views.
It is a tool for generating and guaging consensus on technical issues.
Regardless of heat, this mailing list must address the issue of whether
filtering SHOULD (in the special meaning of RFC 2119) be done during
the SMTP transaction. If we can't reach consensus on such a fundamental
and simple issue, then this mailing list is distinctly worse than useless.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com
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