On Sep 21, 2006, at 5:31 PM, Charlie Brady wrote:
On Thu, 21 Sep 2006, John Peacock wrote:
Charlie Brady wrote:
If found no explanation for this "extension" of the protocol.
RFC-2554 discusses AUTH=<address> as a _parameter_ of the MAIL
FROM command,
Sure, but I don't see any relevance there.
Yeah, a seperate thing.
and apparently Postfix (among others) added that to the list of
AUTH values because some ESMTP clients broke otherwise.
Whoever did it first did so foolishly. The ESMTP clients which
broke unless capabilities included AUTH= would have worked with
*no* servers.
... [snip] ...
The clients with parsing problems were broken. They would have been
fixed. By catering to them, now all servers much be RFC non-
complient - "AUTH=xxx" is not a valid ehlo-line.
I agree with all of this whole heartedly. However, since the broken
clients do exist, now most SMTP servers also cater to them, and thus
there is a viscious cycle (as new clients can usually get away with
supporting the wrong syntax). Philosophical debates about the tragedy
of the commons aside, I think it would be nice to provide the
administrator the flexibility to determine whether his/her server
will provide the hackish workaround. It's just a binary configuration
value.
Cheers,
Brian
---
Brian Szymanski
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
cell: 202.747.4019
work: 202.546.0777 ext. 114
skype: xbrianskix
aim: xbrianskix
