On Wed, 04 Jun 2003 11:54:03 EDT, Dean Anderson said:
Implementors are not the only users of standards. Businsess seek to
purchase and sell "Standard" Services, and may receive just and public
criticism for not providing the services they claim to provide. In some
jurisdictions, this could conceivably be considered fraud, and/or unfair
trade practices. So if a business (SMTP client vendor, SMTP server
vendor, ISP, etc) claims to provide "Standard SMTP Service", and comply
with the "SMTP Standard", to which RFC should they be held accountable?
Given that the Cisco PIX claimed to have an SMTP implementation from the
very beginning, and they still sold lots of them, I don't think there's much
chance of leveraging a lawsuit over the distinction between 821 and 2821.
(For those not familiar with the early PIX software, the best that can be
said about it is "near-universal derision". Cisco has, to its credit, fixed
all of the glaring bogosities that I'm aware of, so the current release of
software *is* at least a "plays well with others" SMTP).
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