Date: 2 Jul 1996 19:01:26 -0000
Message-ID: <19960702190126.8150.qmail@koobera.math.uic.edu>
From: djb@koobera.math.uic.edu (D. J. Bernstein)
To: drums@cs.utk.edu
Subject: Re: libel

> p.s. At the risk of starting a discussion of elementary statistical sampling
> theory, one has to be suspicious of any email behavior pattern statistics
> derived by inspecting the mail database of someone who builds and
> distributes mail systems, especially when those statistics "prove" that the
> behavior of the mail system in question is dominant/correct.

qmail's SMTP client does not support ESMTP.

The statistic that I was pointing out---namely, the vast majority of
current ESMTP clients revert to HELO if they don't see ESMTP in the
greeting line---is thus independent of qmail's behavior. It also doesn't
``prove'' anything about qmail's behavior.

Most of the issues I've discussed on DRUMS are things that won't affect
qmail. The problem is that DRUMS is carelessly standardizing behavior
that could hurt _other_ implementors and users.

Two recent examples: (1) My 822 parsing library can trivially handle
multiple To fields---in fact, to stop after the first To field, the
caller would have to do a bit more work---but the same is apparently
not true of other libraries. (2) qmail automatically handles its own
aliases in RCPT commands, with no configuration, but sendmail doesn't.

> In any event, only a fool would claim that ESMTP deployment isn't still in a
> transitional state.
 
And only a fool would pretend that ESMTP is 100% deployed.

---Dan