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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: SMTP AUTH
Is it time to break out the "Please do not feed the trolls" sign? Feeding 'em anyway... but *plonk* for Mr. Anderson. For those who are masochists, read on. On Sun, May 01, 2005 at 10:50:29PM -0400, Dean Anderson wrote: > But only 16 email clients (counting Netscape, Mozilla, and Firefox > separately), support SMTP AUTH. But there are more than 1000 different > email client programs. Firefox isn't an email client... maybe you're thinking of Thunderbird? There may be lots of programs, but most / all of the ones that people actually USE support SMTP auth. Most of the less popular ones I've heard of / seen support SMTP auth as well - Becky!, The Bat, Mulberry, OS X's Mail.app. I could probably name more than 16 off the top of my head[2]. Better yet, try to name 16 mail clients people _actually use_ which DON'T, other than MUA-only programs like mailx and mutt with no SMTP support at all. When I worked at a mediumish sized hosting company with probably well over 100k mail users, I can't _ever_ recall hearing about a complaint of a customer using a mail client that didn't support SMTP auth. > With seat belts, there is mandated 100% compliance. With SMTP AUTH, > there is presently approximately 0.16% compliance. Bullshit. The percentage as measured by number of actual USERS is high, since 99.99% [1] of all users are using an MUA which supports SMTP auth. Plus, most people have access to a mail server through their ISP / school / workplace which relays for local clients.... but not for the rest of the universe. If you really want to make an argument against SMTP auth, there are definitely support hassles involved in getting people setup to use it. > Unless you want to exclude all but 16 or so mail clients (out of more > than 1000), you can't really require SMTP AUTH. Some ISPs > (residential) specify the mail client programs (or like AOL, provide > custom software). They already have per-user accounts, and can > therefore implement SMTP AUTH more easily. But then, *some* ISPs > assume all their users run Windows, too. Not everyone is in that > boat. There are plenty of non-Windows mailers which support SMTP auth - the list below includes quite a few Mac OS, cross platform, and UNIX / Linux clients. Not only that, but on a *nix system, it's possible to configure the MTA as an authenticated SMTP client - at that point, you could use whatever you wanted (either via SMTP to localhost or /usr/sbin/sendmail) and have it sent on. On Mon, May 02, 2005 at 12:11:35AM -0400, Richard A Steenbergen wrote: > Just be glad no one has set up a net kook DNSBL yet. Thankfully, there's always procmail. :0 * ^From:.*<[email protected]\.com /dev/null On Sun, May 01, 2005 at 11:29:54PM -0400, Dean Anderson wrote: > On Sun, 1 May 2005, Joe Maimon wrote: > > How much credibility are you trying to lose? > I have 9 years of operational experience running open relays. > > How many years of open relay operations experience do you have? I have none (well other than accidentally) - that's a BAD thing? Are you talking about a mail machine configured to relay for your own networks, or open relays configured to relay for anyone / everyone? I wouldn't really call the former an "open relay". ------ [1] And 85.4% of statistics are made up on the spot. And probably out of that 99.99%, 86% or more are using Outlook or Outlook Express. [2] Ok, so I had to do a tiny bit of poking around. But not a lot. 1. Netscape (4.x, 6.x, 7.x - we'll count them as 1) 2. Mozilla Mail 3. Thunderbird 4. Becky! 5. Mulberry 6. The Bat! 7. Outlook 8. Outlook Express 9. Eudora 10. Entourage 11. Mailsmith 12. Mail.app (Apple Mail) 13. Opera 7 14. Evolution 15. Kmail 16. Balsa 17. Sylpheed 18. Pine 19. Mew 20. PowerMail
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