On May 5, 2008, at 6:20 AM, Sabahattin Gucukoglu wrote:
On Mon, 05 May 2008 11:51:30 +0200, Alessandro Vesely
<vesely(_at_)tana(_dot_)it>
wrote:
Sabahattin Gucukoglu wrote:
To be sure, it sounds like the right thing to do. As yet, though,
there's no justification in doing it other than that queue
clogging will often result if you don't. Is it *semantically*
correct to reject mail just because bounces for the sender are
undeliverable?
That question seems ill-conditioned to me. It is semantically
correct to reject mail because the *recipient* is undeliverable.
The question is written as intended, but we appear to be in agreement.
I still want to know why sender verification is a good idea,
though. If the recipient validation is sufficient to reduce
backscatter and queue cloggage, why *are* we insisting upon a
semantic disapproval of invalid
sender addresses? What kind of high horse are we on, to insist that
even under normal mail delivery circumstances, sender addresses of
less-than-perfect form may not be used?
Messages are often carried over multiple MTAs where the majority of
messages exchanged are undesired. Checks performed at each differ,
where for example, a full mailbox will still likely result in non-
delivery notifications. To avoid delays and high losses occurring
with NDNs, validation of the return path _prior_ to message acceptance
best ensures delivery integrity. Return-path validation should become
just a check for an associated MX record.
Certainly, to me, this looks like an anti-spam tool which, while
tempting to the eye of the postmaster wishing to reduce tempfailing
blowback, is already seeing diminished usefullness and which is
known to break legitimate mail.
Legitimate mail must be made easy to recognize. In effect, this means
any domain transmitting SMTP messages should publish MX records.
Otherwise this will expose any domain being spoofed as originating a
spam campaign to what may be significant amounts of highly distributed
undesired traffic. This traffic is associated with attempts to
deliver NDNs and to confirm of the return-path by establishing a
connection. After all, an address record says nothing about whether
the SMTP service is supported.
-Doug