Jonn R Taylor wrote: > Charters latest for blocking mail. They must block mail that has any > kind of attachments. We have a user that sends her self pdf's to her > home account that is hosted by charter.net. Maybe every one should > just blacklist charter and then maybe they will get the hint. Anyway, > I thought that this was prohibited by RFC's? Why would blocking email with attachments be prohibited by RFC's?
This isn't something that would really fall under that kind of scope. RFCs are about functionality in a very basic and broad sense, ie: things that affect the internet as a whole. This is about irrational and stupid behavior. Generally the RFCs have nothing to do with the later, as long as it doesn't hurt the former. Charters servers still function for email transfer, and don't wind up overloading other servers, etc. Now, their servers may not be very useful to their customers, but that's the customer's problem, it's not a problem for the internet as a whole. The customer can't receive email they want, but all the other servers in the world handle this stupid decision gracefully, so they can continue to operate smoothly. Some things in the RFCs might not look like they're oriented around pure function, but a little thought will usually lead you to one. For example, accepting null-return path emails is critical to the functioning of SMTP's error handling mechanisms. Refusing them affects not only your server, but possibly other networks as they faithfully attempt to carry out their error reporting requirements, only to have their time wasted by a shortsighted configuration change. Not only that, but if your server is doing something to actually cause billions of bounce messages, you'd never know about the problem, because you'd never get the error reports. Etc, Etc, Etc,
