Date: Wed, 4 Oct 1995 20:15:13 +0200 (GMT+0200)
From: Alan Barrett <barrett@iafrica.com>
To: drums@cs.utk.edu
Subject: Re: support for Postmaster address
In-Reply-To: <199509220740.DAA17233@wilma.cs.utk.edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.3.91.951004200624.439Z-100000@daisy.ee.und.ac.za>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

Sorry, I am a week or two behind in drums mail.

> But it's not clear in the world of MX records whether the
> Postmaster address must be supported for every domain name
> that can possibly receive mail, or for every parent domain
> of a domain that can possibly receive mail.

I once understood the line from RFC822 that says

	"Postmaster@domain" is required to be valid

as a requirement that *every domain* had to have a postmaster, even
if it did not otherwise have any email addresses, and I went to some
trouble to make postmaster@za work, but I have since seen the error of
my ways.

> I'm tempted to suggest that the Postmaster address must be
> supported for 
> 
> + any domain that appears on the right-hand side of an @ in a 
>   sender address (either header or envelope), or

Yes.

> + any domain which is listed as a mail exchanger for some other 
>   domain, or
> + any domain which appears in a Received header.

As others have said, there are cases where that's not easy
to support.

--apb (Alan Barrett)