Paul's Mailfrom (Was: IETF SMTP Working Group Proposal at smtpng.org)

Tue Aug 27 10:16:33 UTC 2002

On Mon, 26 Aug 2002, Brad Knowles wrote:

> 	I still think that it causes problems for mailing lists.

I understand the proposal to be based on the envelope sender, not the
sender in the body.  Hence, mailing lists work, because they are the
envelope sender, not the person who submitted the mail to the mailing
list.

If that is not the case, then Paul needs to be hassled until the wording
is clear that mailing lists will continue to work.

> 	Moreover, you need to know the complete outbound path for all
> e-mail, from soup to nuts, so that you can add all those machines to
> the list of known mail-from MX entries for your domain.
>
> 	I'm sorry, complete information like this just doesn't exist
> anymore.  Knowledge like this did exist twenty or more years ago,

Pardon?  Are you saying that for a given entity (say, example.com), your
administrative procedures are such that you do not know all the machines
that can send email directly to that part of the Internet outside that
entity?

Even for an entity like aol.com, their outbound mail servers appear to be
a small(ish) set of circa 20 machines which can be listed appropriately by
AOL.

> back when there were only a few UUCP nodes.  But even then, things
> quickly got to a point where people couldn't possibly know all
> possible paths between any two points, and people just listed their
> address from a small set of "well known" nodes.

Yes, entirely correct.  However, the bulk of the Internet mail today is
from one host to another host.  Knowledge of the path the mail takes, on
the SMTP level, is not needed by the mailer, unlike UUCP which required
the mailer to be aware of various routing topologies.

The rest of your mail is an invitation to clean up the little bit of
forward and reverse domain space that is under your immediate control,
which is a Good Thing IMO.

--==--
Bruce.