From: <RANDY@MPA15AB.MV.UNISYS.COM>
Date: 08 JAN 96 15:21   
To: <drums%cs.utk.edu@MVDNS1.MV-oc.Unisys.COM>,
        <klensin%MAIL1.RESTON.MCI.NET@MVDNS1.MV-oc.Unisys.COM>
Subject: Re: "be liberal in what you accept" considered harmful
In-Reply-To: Your message of "08 Jan 1996 09:28:27 -0500"
Message-Id: <EBJR1940729ACD@MPA15AB>

On 08 Jan 1996 09:28:27 -0500, John C Klensin <klensin@MAIL1.RESTON.MCI.
NET> wrote:

> Be very smart about what you are doing.  If what comes in is
> incorrect, and you guess at what it was intended to mean, you will
> sometimes get it wrong.  When that results in mail delivery to the
> wrong mailbox, you will end up in more trouble than if you had
> rejected the stuff.

My thinking on this is that an implementation should be as liberal as
possible in areas that don't affect delivery, such as line lengths and
RSET commands and such, but I agree that being liberal in areas such as
RCPT TO commands with invalid addresses (such as "foo@gork" with no
qualification on the host) is dangerous and not a good idea.  Of course,
even in such seemingly innocent areas as line lengths, accepting invalid
messages could be trouble, since a host down the line might have trouble
with it and be unable to deal with it gracefully.

> Speaking of which, Randy, your host or gateway changes every instance
> of
>     mailbox@dom.ain
> into
>     mailbox%dom.ain@MVDNS1.MV-oc.Unisys.COM
> This certainly violates the spirit of the rules and can be argued to
> violate the letter of them.  Can you get it fixed?

I know our gateway causes all sorts of trouble.  I apologize for it.  I
am trying to get it replaced.  I will see what I can do in the meantime.
(Our net admins are in totally different groups than us software
developers...)  The fact that the gateway still uses "MV-oc" as our
domain name is a case in point.  The net admins have decreed that our
domain is "mv" and that "MV-oc" will be removed as an alias.  Yet the
gateway continues to generate it.

----
|Randall Gellens             |                    randy@mv.unisys.com|
|(714) 380-6350              | fax (714)597-8053 can add ,,,,,,,,6350|
|Mail Stop MV 237            |                        Net**2 656-6350|
|Opinions are personal;  facts are suspect;   I speak only for myself|