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Re: Fw: Received your email

2004-08-26 09:04:17
At 01:58 PM 8/25/2004 -0400, you wrote:
The fact that the pretty point-and-drool user interface produces a
configuration that violates RFC2821 isn't really relevant. The
configuration was wrong -- it was misconfigured.

Email is hard. Wrapping it in a pretty GUI doesn't make users into
competent sysadmins. People ship crap 'products'. Boo hoo.
-- 
dwmw2
***************** REPLY SEPARATER *****************
This is not about the Pros and Cons of GUI, or whether the bug is in the
mail program, or the GUI, or the Operating System, and I will not get drawn
into those discussions. This is about the fact that these anomolies do
exist in legitimate mail servers, and we cannot ignore that fact.

The validity of using the HELO/EHLO information has been discussed at
length on this list in the past, but it never struck home until now. There
is currently no easy way to determine what a server outputs in the HELO
response. It is not logged anywhere, and the problem has never been pointed
out in all online checks run against the server, because the server was not
initiating the action. Yes, a person knowledgable of Sendmail can say that
this is the same variable that is used elsewhere in the program, and the
HELO output can be deduced from other places, but what of all the other
mail programs out there?

The magnitude of this problem is not known, and until such time as it can
be quantified, it is dangerous to make assumptions based on what it should be.

J.A. Coutts


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