-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Delany [mailto:markd+dkim(_at_)yahoo-inc(_dot_)com]
Sent: Thursday, October 29, 2009 5:31 PM
To: Murray S. Kucherawy
Cc: dcrocker(_at_)bbiw(_dot_)net; IETF DKIM WG
Subject: Re: [ietf-dkim] DKIM on envelope level
Do you mean the server's side of the connection will have buffer
data in it? That would mean the client sent DATA<CR><LF> followed
by header/body information, possibly even in the same packet,
without waiting for the reply from DATA. The server could drop the
connection
I haven't been watching lately, but at some point a popular bot
technique was to send the whole transaction without looking at the
responses. After all, what do they care?
It was popular enough to generate the "greet_pause" feature in
sendmail - as you must know. I don't know whether "greet_pause"-type
detection is so wide-spread now that spammers have moved away from
doing it, but I'll bet a lot still don't care and just blast away.
I agree that they're probably doing that, but you can save yourself a lot of
server-side stuff like temporary storage of a (possibly large) message body,
creation of a thread, etc. if you observe at DATA that there's more information
pending before you've sent back the 354. Sure, the bits have already come down
the wire and into a kernel socket buffer, but the client can abort early
(freeing resources, maybe even shutting down the session) which conserves some
user-level server resources.
The same might be true if at DATA the client has failed some kind of envelope
signature test like what's been proposed.
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