Re: seeking: Ian Jackson
martin f krafft writes ("seeking: Ian Jackson"):
> In the mean time, I'd be grateful if Ian gave me a means to
> communicate with him. Or if someone would offer to relay a message
> to him.
A few people have drawn my attention to this thread, thanks. For
future reference, my db.debian.org entry ought to have my phone number
in it and I think it's fine to use that when email fails.
I've added a hole in my filter for *.madduck.net so martin should be
able to email me now.
> Yes, lapse.madduck.net is a CNAME (*c*anonical *name*) to an MX RR,
> and that's RFC-compliant ttbomk. If it is not, I would appreciate if
> someone shoved the relevant sections into my face.
The prevailing IETF standard for mail transmission over the Internet
is STD-10 (RFC821), which says:
3.7. DOMAINS
...
Whenever domain names are used in SMTP only the official names are
used, the use of nicknames or aliases is not allowed.
"CNAME" in CNAME RR means "the lhs domain is an alias; the canonical
name is as follows". So
lapse.madduck.net. CNAME rw.madduck.net.
means
"lapse.madduck.net's canonical name is rw.madduck.net"
ie that lapse.madduck.net is _not_ a canonical name but an alias.
RFC2181 is helpful on this point:
10.1.1. CNAME terminology
It has been traditional to refer to the label of a CNAME record as "a
CNAME". This is unfortunate, as "CNAME" is an abbreviation of
"canonical name", and the label of a CNAME record is most certainly
not a canonical name. It is, however, an entrenched usage. Care
must therefore be taken to be very clear whether the label, or the
value (the canonical name) of a CNAME resource record is intended.
In this document, the label of a CNAME resource record will always be
referred to as an alias.
If you have a suggestion for improving the error message I'd be happy
to hear it - but preferably not anything much longer than the existing
message "DNS alias found where canonical name wanted" which is already
rather on the long side.
> The spammers have long won if people put such boulders in the way of
> communication. Oh wait, I doubt spammers use CNAMEs...
Statistics for this cause of rejection for last week:
-chiark:~> grep 'DNS alias found where canonical name wanted' /var/log/sauce/reject.log.0 | wc -l
19893
-chiark:~>
This includes attempts which would also have been rejected for some
other reason, but it gives an idea of the prevalence.
And yes, I'm afraid I agree with you - the spammers have indeed won.
I regret the inconvenience.
Regards,
Ian.
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