At 06:56 PM 2/15/98 -0500, Todd Vierling wrote:
>On Sat, 14 Feb 1998, Brian Behlendorf wrote:
>
>: A less error-prone solution to this problem would be to allow mail daemons
>: to trust DNS, and if they're listed as an MX for a domain, accept the mail.
>: If they're the best-preference MX, treat the mail as local. If they're
>: not best-preference, accept it and queue it for the best-preference. That
>: way mail administrators wouldn't have to maintain lists of domains they are
>: local for, and domains they are backup-MX for.
>
>This is truthfully not an adequate solution. There are many reasons to have
>outbound mail relays that do _not_ accept incoming mail (hence not an MX for
>a domain) and many e-mail address redirectors (such as Pobox, which I use)
>and people that use multiple ISP's and only one mail address--if you require
>mail to be relayed through a domain's own MX's, you will lose. I'm
>currently in a verbal fight with the admins at Xerox (where I work) about
>this.
>
>If this is what you do, you lose more valuable mail than you gain in a lack
>of spam.
You're talking about something else completely different. You're talking
about relaying outgoing mail - I'm talking about relaying incoming mail
through a backup MX.
As for relaying outgoing mail: if you're sending a message from within
Xerox, from an IP number that only an employee could be using, with a From:
of "tv@pobox.com", I don't see any problem with Xerox's mail servers
relaying your mail. That is to say, I don't see a reason why they would
refuse to do that; effectively the weak "authentication" is the IP address.
Doing so is not incompatible with the solution I suggested above. Surely
you don't mean Xerox should let a dialup netcom user relay mail from
pobox.com through Xerox's smtp servers, unless that user is somehow
authenticated...
On a related topic, why doesn't SMTP have a "redirect" response code, i.e.
the equivalent of the 301 or 302 response codes in HTTP? If a user has set
up a .forward, it makes more sense to me to have the user's MTA make one
attempted and one actual delivery rather than one delivery and then the
forwarding agent make a delivery. Seems that we could build some new
anti-spam mechanisms if redirection were the norm.
Brian
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