Re: RFC1035 and MTA's
Thomas Lakofski <tommy@88.net> writes:
> I was wondering if anyone else was feeling constrained in their choice of
> MTA's on debian because of complaints about RFC1035 and their FQDN.
> Neither smail or exim will work on my system, because, apparently, my
> domain name does not comply to RFC1035 (if this is so, neither does
> 3com.com or 1800flowers.com, etc. etc.).
RFC1912 (Common DNS Operational and Configuration Errors) says:
Allowable characters in a label for a host name are only ASCII
letters, digits, and the `-' character. Labels may not be all
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
numbers, but may have a leading digit (e.g., 3com.com). Labels must
^^^^^^^
end and begin only with a letter or digit. See [RFC 1035] and [RFC
1123]. (Labels were initially restricted in [RFC 1035] to start with
a letter, and some older hosts still reportedly have problems with
the relaxation in [RFC 1123].) Note there are some Internet
hostnames which violate this rule (411.org, 1776.com).
[...]
If a domain name is to be used for mail (not involving SMTP), it must
follow the rules for mail in [RFC 822], which is actually more
liberal than the above rules. Labels for mail can be any ASCII
character except "specials", control characters, and whitespace
characters. "Specials" are specific symbols used in the parsing of
addresses. They are the characters "()<>@,;:\".[]". (The "!"
character wasn't in [RFC 822], however it also shouldn't be used due
to the conflict with UUCP mail as defined in RFC 976) However, since
today almost all names which are used for mail on the Internet are
also names used for hostnames, one rarely sees addresses using these
relaxed standard, but mail software should be made liberal and robust
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^~~~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
enough to accept them.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I don't think exim and smail should refuse to work just because
they're trying to be strict (it *is* just possible to run email
without DNS) but I'm not surprised if they don't work.
There's nothing wrong with 3com.com, btw, which upgrading *really* old
DNS servers wouldn't fix.
--
Carey Evans http://home.clear.net.nz/pages/c.evans/
GNU GPL: "The Source will be with you... always."
--
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to
debian-user-request@lists.debian.org .
Trouble? e-mail to templin@bucknell.edu .
Reply to: