if AOL actually send a 220 greeting (instead of just not answering) then
they should keep on listening and 550 the rest of the commands sent (except
quit), dropping the connection is aganinst the RFC's (not that anyone really
seems to care too much about those anymore)
----Original Message Follows----
From: "Stuart D. Gathman" <stuart(_at_)bmsi(_dot_)com>
Reply-To: spf-discuss(_at_)v2(_dot_)listbox(_dot_)com
To: spf-discuss(_at_)v2(_dot_)listbox(_dot_)com
Subject: [spf-discuss] A Cautionary Tale concerning AOL
Date: Thu, 4 Nov 2004 14:30:08 -0500 (EST)
<snip>
COMPLAINT:
One thing that AOL screwed up on: they drop the connection rather than
issuing a 5xx status. The end user sees "connection dropped, will retry
for the next 12 days" and there is no indication of why there is a
problem. AOL issues a 2xx status, with human readable text providing
the URL above and then drops the connection. This is very wrong.
They should issue a 5xx status so that the MTA knows to pass the
error on to the user.
</snip>