At 10:25 AM -0800 2/25/03, Mark Hartman wrote:
> No, they're NOT doing it "correctly." A 450 would be "correctly;" it
> would report that that particular mailbox can't be accessed at the moment.
> A storage problem is not the issue. The MessageWall software has a problem.
I got a response from the sysadmin at the site in question:
=== Begin forwarded message ===
>From RFC2821:
RFC 821 [30] incorrectly listed the error where an SMTP server
exhausts its implementation limit on the number of RCPT commands
("too many recipients") as having reply code 552. The correct reply
code for this condition is 452. Clients SHOULD treat a 552 code in
this case as a temporary, rather than permanent, failure so the logic
below works.
When a conforming SMTP server encounters this condition, it has at
least 100 successful RCPT commands in its recipients buffer. If the
server is able to accept the message, then at least these 100
addresses will be removed from the SMTP client's queue. When the
client attempts retransmission of those addresses which received 452
responses, at least 100 of these will be able to fit in the SMTP
server's recipients buffer. Each retransmission attempt which is
able to deliver anything will be able to dispose of at least 100 of
these recipients.
If an SMTP server has an implementation limit on the number of RCPT
commands and this limit is exhausted, it MUST use a response code of
452 (but the client SHOULD also be prepared for a 552, as noted
above). If the server has a configured site-policy limitation on the
number of RCPT commands, it MAY instead use a 5XX response code.
This would be most appropriate if the policy limitation was intended
to apply if the total recipient count for a particular message body
were enforced even if that message body was sent in multiple mail
transactions.
MessageWall is clearly in violation of the 100-recipient minimum.
Stalker is clearly in violation of the understanding of a 452 result,
and is taking the result as applying to all recipients *and* not
requeueing.. As the vast majority of MTAs in use handle this correctly
(all currently shipping MTAs that I am aware of except Stalker,
including postfix, sendmail, qmail, exim, MS Exchange, Groupwise and
IMail), I believe the onus sits clearly on the Stalker team to fix
this.
=== End forwarded message ===
... and I can't find a reason to disagree, even though I don't think
that supporting quite an onerous restriction is a good idea.
Dmitry?
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