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Re: smail (again..... sheesh..)



On Mon, 9 Mar 1998, Soenke Lange wrote:

 : > No, I'm just telling them that the mail originated in my isp's domain.
 : > The HELO supposedly tells them who I am.
 : > 
 : Yes! ... HELO/EHLO your.domain.org 
 : then smail (with some switches on) will test if the name and the IP# of the
 : originating host correspond, else smail will not accept mail from this
 : host. Other MTA will differ .. but with this method most spams will not find
 : the way to you...
 : Still there are lots of misconfigured Mail server, but if more and more
 : people using smail or some other strong spam protection, they will convert 
 : there configs (imho).

Well, OK, you might call them misconfigured. But read this quote from
rfc1985: "[...] there is no documented stipulation for checking the 
authenticity of the remote host name, as given in the HELO or EHLO command."

I cannot find any pointers in more or less official documents stateing that
HELO/EHLO *should* be followed by the same argument as the reverse
DNS-lookup tells. Do you agree?

So why should Smail block any mail coming from mailhosts not correctly
announcing their hostname in the smtp-greeting ? Certainly, a lot of spam
could be blocked this way, but on the other hand, lots of 'legal' mail get
lost too :( 


bye,

Remco


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