Programmers with network engineering skills

Joe Greco jgreco at ns.sol.net
Tue Mar 13 20:33:37 UTC 2012


> Joe Greco wrote:
> > The ideal world contains a mix of techniques.
> 
> Yes and copying parts of relevant code of an MTA could be one.

May actually be one of the few sane ones.

> > You cannot just blindly leave it to the MTA to decide what's valid.
> > Along that path lies madness.  How do you pass the address to the MTA?
> > Don't do it as a system() call unless you want someone to own your
> > box with a semicolon. 
> 
> Well, the whole world can pass whatever it wants to an MTA, it's 
> supposed to be listening on internet facing port 25 all the time, that's 
> it's mean reason of existence. An MTA is particularly well suited to 
> take any kind of abuse, because that's exactly what it's expecting.
> 
> Unless in cases such as Owen mentioned I'd say it's a pretty good 
> solution. The madness to me lies in making your own email validating code...

This is probably one of those things where the spec was good when it
was written for reasons that were good at the time, but now many years
later in a generally completely FQDN-ified world, there's little valid
reason to need to be able to support some of the odd possible syntaxes
that we used twenty or thirty years ago.

The problem is, current programmers look at the evil spec, say "fooey
with that," and then code up something that is too unreasonably 
restrictive in the opposite direction.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.




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