>We could talk about
>whether the X1 does or does not violate the RFC but I would rather talk
>about the problem and find a solution.
Very good.
>Ipswitch receives many requests for updates, tweaks, enhancements. What
>will help me assess the impact is to know what problem is caused by IMail
>Server returning X1 as the first two characters and the frequency.
I am not aware of any known obvious problems at this point in time (meaning
that there are likely unknown problems, such as perhaps AOL weighing this,
and non-obvious problems, such as programs that keep track of Internet hosts).
I do recall recently hearing of an anti-spam activist talking about
comparing the host name in the greeting with other information. I
mentioned that IMail always reports the "X1", and his response was
"So?". If tests on the host name in the greeting become popular, it can be
similar to open relays or reverse DNS entries -- there are a lot out of
misconfigured servers out there, but these types of tests can still be very
useful in determining whether E-mail is spam or not.
And, there's something called a "de facto standard" -- something everyone
just does, even if it isn't a standard. And I haven't seen any other mail
server that doesn't include the hostname in the proper location in the
greeting (except for mailservers behind oddball firewalls that hide all
characters except "0" and "2"). So even if it isn't required by the RFCs
(although I firmly believe it is), it's still something everyone else does,
and any interpretation of the RFCs will agree that having the host name
there is at least encouraged, if not required.
>If this was causing 20% of all message to be rejected then we have a very
>serious
>problem, regardless of what the RFC says.
We know that quite a few people have problems sending mail to AOL. We know
that AOL has had a chance to obtain the hostname of many mail servers, and
could use it as a "secret" criteria (in addition to their publicly
acknmowledged criteria). We also know that AOL does have secret criteria
for deleting E-mail to them (a missing reverse DNS entry is used in a
weighting system). Although there is no evidence that AOL uses the lack of
a valid hostname as criteria, there is no evidence that they do not.
That alone could make the "X1" issue extremely important very quickly, if
it is proven that AOL checks that.
-Scott
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