ietf-smtp
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Re: STARTTLS & EHLO: Errata text?

2009-01-29 19:38:04

SM wrote:

One of the questions was about the "The client SHOULD send an EHLO command as the first command after a successful TLS negotiation." As with everything SMTP, there are two sides, the sender and the receiver. Instead of thinking in terms of whether the sender should send the command, we could look at this in terms of whether the receiver must accept a mail transaction without being sent an EHLO command. I don't see anything in the specifications that say that.

The more I think about this, I think its just all fine. We had one client presented here who failed to reissue a EHLO/HELO as expected in practice. The server issues a negative response and the client failed to continue properly. Even if the implementer read 3207 as a SHOULD, that alone should be enough to tell the client that it MAY have to reissue the EHLO/HELO if the MAIL FROM: command failed.

In other words,

  SHOULD says "Be Prepared To Reissue EHLO/HELO"

There is nothing that says that it does not need to send it and abort the transaction if the server requires it.

--
Sincerely

Hector Santos, CTO
http://www.santronics.com
http://santronics.blogspot.com