Sam wrote:
> Matthew Brown writes:
> > The difference is that sendmail makes a halfhearted attempt
> > at compliance, and qmail doesn't.
>
> Agreed. Now, which one would you rather have?
Noncompliance rather than semi-compliance.
> > Are you seriously suggesting that, for the sake of these
> > saintly, antiquated 7 bit only mailservers, we should drop
> > people's emails on the floor?
>
> No, and that's the whole point. If you forward it along
> without encoding it as quoted-printable, it *WILL* be
> dropped on the floor.
WILL? That's a bit extreme. I have NEVER seen any MTA drop a message for
such a reason.
The most that will EVER happen is that the message will be flattened to
seven bits and the eighth-bit-on characters will come out a bit strange. An
annoyance, but No Big Deal.
>
> > Also, let me put it this way: is there any MTA out there
> > that only accepts 7bit mail that should not be upgraded
> > for many other reasons?
>
> Yes. aol.com. As long as their 7bit mail relay handles
> almost a hundred million messages per day, I think it's
> pretty safe to say that it does its job as it should.
No, just that it does its job adequately as far as AOL is concerned. I
assume they use some system of their own devising?
> It's possible that AOL's mail relays will properly handle
> transparent 8bit mail now, I really don't know. But even
> if they do, if they suddenly decide that they want to make
> their relays fully RFC-compliant, they're going to
> do it, and they will start dropping your non-compliant mail
> on the floor, whether you like it, or not. And there's not
> a damn thing you will be able to do about it.
a) They don't do this
b) There's no reason for them to do this
c) It violates the liberal-acceptance implicit policy behind all email
systems
d) They won't.
They won't because I'm sure that dropping them would be more of a pain in
the ass than accepting them, both from the mailserver load POV, the added
customer service POV, the bad publicity POV ...
Even QMAIL (and we know how stubborn Dan can be) goes to some effort to
accept mail from grossly uncompliant systems.
-Matt
--
Matt Brown ---- UNIX Administrator ---- tickets.com
Phone: (714) 327-5571 --- Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
