Verisign suggestion

Thu Sep 18 05:16:14 UTC 2003

On Thu, 18 Sep 2003 00:36:05 EDT, David B Harris <david at eelf.ddts.net>  said:

> If they don't accept anything on port 25, either by sending all packets
> to /dev/null or by responding with SYN+RST ("Connection refused"), MTAs
> everywhere will consider this a "temporary error."

They could save us a bunch of RTTs, remove concerns they were harvesting
the MAIL FROM and RCPT TO, and lower their load if they just implemented
RFC1846 and replied '521 64.94.110.11 Fleep Off'

>From RFC1846:

1. Motivations

   Hosts on the Internet have shifted from large, general-purpose hosts
   to smaller, more specialized hosts.  There is an increasing number of
   hosts which are dedicated to specific tasks, such as serving NTP or
   DNS.  These dedicated hosts frequently do not provide mail service.

   Usually, these mailless hosts do not run an SMTP server.
   Unfortunately, users will occasionally misaddress mail to these
   hosts.  Regular SMTP clients attempting to deliver this misaddressed
   mail must treat the lack of an SMTP server on the host as a temporary
   error.  They must queue the mail for later delivery, should an SMTP
   server be started at a later time.

   This causes the mail to remain queued for days, until it is returned
   with what is usually a confusing error message.

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