On Mon, 7 Jul 2008, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > So who's going to explain to the Vatican that, sorry, > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] doesn't work any more? Or will the US take > > issue when addresses @as, which is part of the US, > > don't work? Or France about @gp and @mq, which are > > as much part of France as Hawaii is part of the US? > > I'd be very surprised if any of these work as-is, with any reliability. > They certainly won't work for email. The assumption that fully > qualified domain names contain at least one '.' is widespread in both > protocol specifications and implementations.
I've been investigating this and I have discovered an oddity that I didn't expect: Exim on my FreeBSD workstation handles TLD MXs without a problem, but on my SuSE mail relays it fails. This is because of different behaviours between the resolver code in the FreeBSD and GNU C libraries. Both of them are based on the BIND resolver code so this is rather surprising! Exim uses res_search() to do DNS lookups. The postmaster can control the resolver's treatment of single-component names using Exim's qualify_single option, which controls the resolver's RES_DEFNAMES flag. GNU libc refuses to resolve a single component domain name unless there's a trailing dot (which there never is for a mail domain), or RES_DEFNAMES is set and . is on the search list. Our mail relays use Exim's own seach logic when looking up MXs so they switch RES_DEFNAMES off; therefore TLD MXs do not work on those machines. FreeBSD libc will resolve single-component names without trailing dots and without RES_DEFNAMES set, so TLD MXs would work on FreeBSD. However, FreeBSD's behaviour has varied in the past, and I suspect the same is true for the upstream BIND resolver code - though I haven't checked the history in detail. So the question of whether TLD MXs work depends on the interactions between lot of complicated option settings and software versions, and is likely in practice to work or fail unpredictably. Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://dotat.at/ TYNE DOGGER: WEST 4 OR 5, OCCASIONALLY 6, BECOMING VARIABLE 3 OR 4, THEN SOUTHEAST 4 OR 5 LATER. SLIGHT OR MODERATE. SHOWERS, RAIN LATER. MODERATE OR GOOD. _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
