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Re: RFC 5321bis / 2821ter

2009-01-23 07:43:37

Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote:

Willie Gillespie writes:
In the interest of learning, how does EHLO help fight spam over
HELO?  I thought it just allowed for extensions...?

The EHLO command names the client; the response names extensions. Have
a look at CSV and BATF to see how the name can be used. 
Doesn't HELO name the client as well? If you don't care about the
extensions, then why not use HELO?

Like Willie, I'm a bit puzzled about how EHLO is better for fighting
spam than HELO. Without knowing that I can't see any reason to deprecate
HELO.

I agree that there's really no good reason for anyone to only use HELO
in new SMTP clients, since (AFAICS) you can just use EHLO with the same
data, and just ignore the response (as you do with HELO), but
deprecating it might lead to unnecessary support issues for people who
are still using HELO (eg because "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"), so
I can't see any reason to change it.

Also, there are also still many servers out there which don't support
EHLO, so clients MUST be able to fall back to HELO in that case.

-- 
Paul Smith

VPOP3 - POP3/SMTP/IMAP4/Webmail Email server for Windows

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