I agree. For me personally, this was not hypothetical. The
Pine mail user agent that I use began to intermittently fail
to connect to the IMAP server even when there was no evidence
of problems with network connectivity. The problem turned
out to be DNS fraud.
I use ssh to connect over DSL service from Earthlink, and
port forwarding to get to the IMAP server. That means Pine
needs to connect to 127.0.0.1 on the forwarded port number.
I don't know why, but Pine does a DNS lookup on 127.0.0.1.
Stop right there. You have a buggy application. You loose. Tough.
If you have buggy applications you should fix them. You should not raise the
buggy behavior at the IETF, ICANN or inter-ISP level as an urgent problem.
There is limited bandwidth and much better things for all these bodies to be
doing with their time.
We have a real problem with Internet Crime that is causing rather more proble
ms than your buggy mailer.
Actually if you had read the followup this was not a
application error but a operator error. Operator errors
are exactly what this misbehaviour depends on. This a
perfectly good example of unexpected consequences.
Note this also breaks the expectations of RFC 1123
If a dotted-decimal number can be entered without such
identifying delimiters, then a full syntactic check must be
made, because a segment of a host domain name is now allowed
to begin with a digit and could legally be entirely numeric
(see Section 6.1.2.4). However, a valid host name can never
have the dotted-decimal form #.#.#.#, since at least the
highest-level component label will be alphabetic.
This implies that entering a address query for #.#.#.# will
NOT return a RRset.
--
Mark Andrews, ISC
1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia
PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742 INTERNET: Mark_Andrews(_at_)isc(_dot_)org
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