On 08/11/2010 02:41 PM, Tony Finch wrote:
Again you are talking about outgoing email. Dave's question is about what
you do with incoming email: How much do you do before replying to
<CRLF>.<CRLF>?
A "smart host" is a general purpose outgoing SMTP relay for use by stub or
queueless SMTP clients.
Some SMTP servers (even some smarthosts) will act as an SMTP client
before replying to the dot. That was true twenty years ago (when random
unix boxes acted as a general spool and MUAs could run e.g. sendmail -bs
or smail -iforget to talk to an SMTP server), and it's true now. IMO it
makes sense too, although not always. It has problems, but so do the
alternatives.
Arnt