On Wed, Jun 29, 2005 at 06:24:40PM -0400, Greg A. Woods said: > [ On Wednesday, June 29, 2005 at 14:55:47 (-0700), Steve Lamb wrote: ] > > Subject: Re: [exim] a large number of domains fronted by Exim are refusing > > bounces... > > Which has been refuted, numerous times, by the > > very valid point that to do so would make other things which should be easy > > more difficult than they need to be. > > Well, such attempts at refutation have failed miserably since they've > all failed to take into account that there are other in fact other > existing and successfull implementations which do make it difficult for > admins to blindly ignore such basic protocol requirements as handling > messages which have null return paths. > > I've never heard anyone complaint that such implementations are more > difficult to use than they need to be either. > > As y'all know I'm most familiar with Smail, which makes it very hard for > the average admin to unilaterally block messages with an empty sender > address, so for another example let's see if you can read between the > lines of this answer from the Postfix FAQ: > > 59. I get a lot of spam with a blank envelope sender address. How can > I block these? > > You don't want to block messages based on the fact that they have a > null return path.
[...] > Or maybe this from the Sendmail on-line docs: > > How do I reject "MAIL FROM:<>"? > > Don't do it! Internet standards require to accept e-mail with an > empty sender address, i.e., [...] You'll note that neither of these say, "you can't do it", they say "don't do it". In sendmail at least it would be fairly easy to write an access rule or a milter to block all mail from a null sender. I would be extremely surprised if postfix couldn't also do similar things, as it has access maps of a sort. If, in fact, postfix is hobbled in this way, then that's another reason I don't use it. -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Stephen Gran | One Bell System - it used to work | | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | before they installed the Dimension! | | http://www.lobefin.net/~steve | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- ## List details at http://www.exim.org/mailman/listinfo/exim-users ## Exim details at http://www.exim.org/ ## Please use the Wiki with this list - http://www.exim.org/eximwiki/
