|
North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: SMTP addresses in <>
> On Jan 4, 2008 10:51 AM, Seth Mattinen <[email protected]> wrote: > > Our mail servers reject connections that don't follow the RFC. Am I > > wrong to do this? > > Seth, > > RFC 1122 (Requirements for Internet Hosts - Communication Layers) > section 1.2.2 (Robustness Principle): > > "Be liberal in what you accept, and That particular philosophy has done great wonders for e-mail and the spam problem, been a key issue on both the penetration and implementation sides of firewall design, etc. "Liberal," when defined as "accept anything you reasonably can, and try to deal with it," appears to be a policy that has had an overall negative impact on protocol design and interoperability on the Internet. "Liberal," if defined instead as "must accept anything in compliance with RFC sender-side MUST/SHOULD/MAY's, and should reject as much of anything else as you can figure out to," would be a better way to have defined "liberal." I think I would have preferred the word "robust" instead of "liberal." This would have spared us the agony of systems that are "smart" enough to go direct-to-MX, but not smart enough to send a valid FROM line. > conservative in what you send" If only a more significant percentage of software was written in that manner... ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
|