Re: What if EHLO/HELO check fails?

Hadmut Danisch wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 23, 2003 at 07:42:50PM -0400, Raymond S Brand wrote:
> 
>>MTA operators will do whatever they want, anyway.
>>
>>Some will terminate the connection as forged.
>>Some will assume that the message is more likely to be SPAM
>>	and do other (content?) checks.
>>Some will note the failure in a (local) X-Header.
>>Some will only log the failure.
>>Some may tarpit the connection.
>>
>>The possibilities are almost endless.
>>
> 
> 
> Raymond, please, stop this "They'll do whatever they want, anyway"
> point of view. This is extremely counterproductive.
>

Calm down people. No need to get festy here. Raymond does have a point 
that MTA operators will retain the final control on what they do with 
the information. The RMX proposals are providing information about the 
sender which is used by the anti-spam tools and MTA in deciding on 
whether the message is spam or not. What they do might be implementation 
specific, and to allow to greater flexibility might need to be retained 
in the implemenators' hands.

> If we use this point of view, we can stop our work right now.
> 
> At least for those who will not do whatever they want we'll have to 
> describe a guideline, including headers, procedures etc. Everything 
> without this is crap.
> 

You can prescribe a recommended way to do something, akin to a BCP 
procedure. However, keep in mind that these methods are simply providing 
another source of information for the MTA. How this information is 
processed may be beyond the purpose of these proposals.

Yakov