On 12/16/19 5:53 PM, Michael Peddemors wrote:
Frankly, it simply points to professionalism, is the operator of the
sending platform informed enough to use a proper FQDN, and often that
is enough to make some operators consider email arriving as less trust
worthy.
Yes, it does point to professionalism. Is the operator of the mail
service professional enough to use only valid criteria in filtering
mail, or do they make arbitrary, uninformed, cargo-cult decisions about
what filtering criteria to use?
I've had offers for contracts blocked by spam filters, only finding out
later when it was too late to get the gig. A single blocked message
can easily cost me tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I don't want to hear about "professsionalism" of people sending mail,
from people who (IMO irresponsibly) promote arbitrary criteria for mail
filtering. It's not "professional" to block valid mail for arbitrary
reasons.
If the sender is caught lying, that's a valid criterion for filtering
mail. If the content of the message is clearly inappropriate, that's a
valid criterion. If the SMTP is clearly a violation of the protocol
specification, that might be a valid criterion. But failure of the
sender to conform to some arbitrary whim, is not a valid criterion.
In a day and age where operators already go far beyond simple
configuration items (eg some refusing to consider email from a domain
without SPF records as more spammy) we should 'up our game'.
No, we should call out the operators who employ bogus criteria (or at
least call out the bogus criteria) because those operators are doing
serious harm to the reliability of email.
Having said that, I don't think the RFC's are the right place to
enforce that you NEED a FQDN yet. Just expect it will probably end up
in a spam folder or rejected, without a white list ;)
We all now pretty well universally reject all email unless the IP
sending it has a PTR record, doesn't mean the RFC should say we HAVE
to have a PTR to send email. (That would probably be a better
starting point).
However, once we go down that slippery slope, it will affect more and
more legacy and legitimate senders.
Let the operators decide what they will and will not accept, still
seems the logical conclusion.
I have yet to see a single operator that does this responsibly, except
for operators who offer customers the option of no spam filtering at all.
Keith
_______________________________________________
ietf-smtp mailing list
ietf-smtp(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-smtp