On 10/16/2013 9:42 AM, David F. Skoll wrote:
On 16 Oct 2013 09:15:07 -0700
"Neil Schwartzman" <n...@cauce.org> wrote:
List verification. Many receiving sites will block after X bounces,
clean up your
you mean "their" list
list from 550s, and spam the real thing from another
botted IP.
<rant>
And you know who we can thank [sic] for this mechanism of list verification?
Microsoft, that's who.
For versions of Microsoft Exchange prior to 2013, you need to jump through
ridiculous hoops to configure it so that invalid RCPT commands are rejected.
By default, Exchange accepts any old RCPT command and then either rejects
after DATA or (if a RCPT
you mean if sender was valid, right
was valid) is forced to generate a delivery failure
notification.
For Exchange 2013, the ridiculous hoops no longer work and I don't
believe it is even possible to configure Exchange 2013 to reject
invalid RCPTs without truly grotesque hacks.
Yeah I had forgotten about that.
I think what's going on here is that Microsoft has been positioning
Exchange for use as a large company platform for some time - the last
version of SBS contained Exchange 2010 and that was the last way that
a smaller company could afford an Exchange server. Check out the
prices on Exchange 2012 and you will see what I mean, plus there's
no easy way that was provided migrate from Exchange 2010 to Exchange
2012. Their hope is that smaller customers will go to the cloud.
To this end they have had an eye on the Exchange server being just a
single cog in a large network. That's why they make you go to an
additional server (or appliance) for spam and antivirus filtering, and
they don't provide that on Exchange.
We never sell an Exchange server installation without specing some
sort of spam prefiltering like a Sophos box or Cisco ASA or something
like that in front of it, and all of those devices have active directory
hooks that query the DC for the usernames and -don't- accept just any
old bogus RCPTs.
Thank you, Microsoft, for making the Internet a better place.
</rant>
Naw, it's much more neglect and forgetting where they came from.
There was a time that people replaced old post.office and other hacky
malservers with exchange because exchange was inexpensive, simple, and
easy for just any monkey to configure.
There was also a time people replaced old Novell Netware servers and
other hacky fileservers with WIndows NT because NT was inexpensive,
simple, and easy for any monkey to configure.
But those days are gone and those products have been replaced by very
expensive, very complicated products that even people who are
professionals have a hard time configuring.
And to be perfectly honest about it I can say exactly the same thing
about the Linux distros who are also headed full speed away from
simplicity and ease and into complexity and difficulty.
I can't boot any current linux distro on an older P4 with 4GB of
ram and have it run any faster than a slug would travel. And there's
a LOT of older 2003 servers out there running on older HP Proliant
G4 and G3 servers or Dell 2650 servers that are 32 bit, running
Exchange 2003, but are rock-solid and have been for years. There's an
opportunity there but nobody in the FOSS community wants to service it.
Instead the Linux people think they can go head-to-head with Microsoft
on brand new $4,000 server hardware.
Ted
Regards,
David.
