Matt Kettler wrote:
At 09:48 AM 12/10/2005, List Mail User wrote:
>> Received: from unknown (HELO 207.96.139.179) (unknown)
>> by unknown with SMTP; 9 Dec 2005 23:37:06 -0000
>
>That's a pretty scary Received: line. At least two of those unknown's
should be
>known. At absolute minimum the "by" clause should be known... eek.
>
You've obviously never seen what kind of mess an "out-of-the-box"
qmail can do to *destroy* mail headers:
Received: from unknown (HELO lh) (unknown)
by unknown with SMTP; 4 Dec 2005 04:01:40 -0000
...
That really makes me wonder if DJB is intentionally trying to make plain
qmail an unusable POS so that nobody will be able to use it without
patching. Or is it a purely accidental side effect?
Any MTA that can ever fail to report the local hostname in the "by"
clause scares me. Ditto for the source IP delivering mail (in the case
of SMTP).
It should at least be really hard to misconfigure an MTA to the point it
does that. Like hacking the source code hard, or at least mucking around
with several options the manpage or conf file warn you not to touch.
DJB is generally of the opinion that if you do not know how to properly
configure your mail server, you should be hiring someone who does. So
no, his software generally does not work right out of the box.
<opinion - not troll>
Personally I have some rather harsh ideas about mail server admins after
the previous two years. In fact I think the configuration of a running
mail server should be difficult and require considerable thought and
planning. My Postmaster mailbox agrees with me ;^)
</opinion>
Qmail can properly report received headers and does so quite well with a
large level of customization, if the admin takes the time to read and
understand the documentation. The problem stated above is simply
corrected by the proper use of the start script in qmail. No patching is
required to run a servicable qmail server, reading the documentation is
however, required. So the qmail server in question did not "fail" to
report the host name or IP, the mail admin "failed" to properly
configure his choosen mail server software.
DAve
