On Sun, Nov 24, 2019 at 10:54:14AM +0100, Gilles Chehade wrote:
> 
> Ten years ago, it seemed a very neat idea that OpenSMTPD would have some
> implicit defaults to avoid people creating open relays.
> 
> Back then I was trying to make the smtpd.conf as compact as possible and
> came up with the very nice idea of "implicit local" so that we would get
> a very compact:
> 
>   accept for any relay
> 
> which would not be an open relay as it translated to:
> 
>   accept from local for any relay
> 
> 
> This idea was carried when we moved the syntax to match/action.
> 
> I think this was an error from the beginning and we should only have the
> explicit notation as I see a trend in people coming up with:
> 
>   match for domain foobar.org action "deliver"
> 
> which, read loud, seems to imply that mail for domain foobar.org will be
> delivered but which actually fails because it translates as:
> 
>   match from local for domain foobar.org action "deliver"
> 
> and actually limits the scope to local users...
> 
> People keep making this mistake over and over which as safe as it is, is
> a serious hint that the mistake is on smtpd's side.
> 
> 
> Is there strong objection to move to a mode where implicit notation will
> no longer be allowed ?

No objections. Yes, please make the notation explicit and remove the
syntactic sugar which often seems to be the reason for confusions.
 
> This could start with us adding the explicit notation to default config,
> then put a startup warning in the next release so configurations are not
> broken but people spot that this is no longer encouraged and we can then
> later kill it.

Sounds like a good plan to me.

Thanks,
Regards,
Joerg

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