> It's an unnecessary change which was forced on us because of an error due to > a request from a single user.
> It's not like the HMC is in and of itself an SMTP server. THe HMC doesn't > have the capability to be an SMTP server. And it's not acting as one. It does however have to act like a well-behaved client. I cited RFC 2505 as a list of commonly accepted requirements for mail servers to illustrate the expectations present in modern mail. > It's using the services of and "existing" SMTP server, and therefor should be > adaptable to that existing environemnt, > not force an additional change to support the HMC. Regrettably, IBM missed that train years ago. Relying on backward compatibility and continuity of interoperability in the Internet standards process has gotten them a long way, and the industry has moved on. If we hung spammers at dawn, this kind of code change and operational practice change wouldn't be necessary. Unfortunately, jerks exist and the software has to set reasonable defaults for "most people" that exclude trivially preventable misuses. That's what happened here. > it was okay of IBM to require this change based on the request of a single > (or even a small or large number) of clients. IBM didn't do it, the rest of the world did. IBM could have better documented the change in the overall expectations as a usage note, but the rest of the world has been doing this for a while. It's been close to a decade since the release of sendmail 8.6 which introduced the checks we're discussing here. I guess it never occurred to anyone that there were people who weren't requiring DNS to be present for everything, etc. (FWIW, the next version of sendmail does away with the possibility of turning off these checks entirely. exim and postfix (the other two widely used SMTP daemons on Unix boxes) already do not allow turning off these checks, as do Exchange and Lotus Notes. Ya gotta bite the bullet and force people to do the right thing for their own good eventually.) In answer to the other question about do we still need the ability to set the From: line, unfortunately, yes. As more and more organizations outsource their mail infrastructure to cloud providers, most outsourced mail servers check for the existance of the user in some directory and refuse to interact if no entry is found. These outsourced servers don't allow the ability to make exceptions, so the ability to supply a valid From: line is necessary. (While we have your attention, IBM, could we please get SMTP over TLS support, pretty please? Being able to really know who you're talking to before you start chatting about userids, etc would really, really be nice.) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
