In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, you wrote:
>At 4:15 PM -0700 9/6/99, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
>
>>>Do you have a limit on the number of RCPTs in a single transaction?
>>
>> Doesn't everybody?
>
>No.
>
>>>(According to SMTP standards you should accept at least 100).
>>
>> I may be mistaken, but I believe that number is just a suggestion, and
>> nor a requirement.
>
><http://www.imc.org/draft-ietf-drums-smtpupd> -- you are mistaken,
>sir. According to the latest draft of the standard update for RFC821,
>a limitation of less than 100 RCPT-TO is a violation of the standard.
>You must accept at least 100. If you limit beyond that, the
>restriction has to be orderly (silently deleting mail or recipients
>that goes over the limit is explicitly denied -- at one point, AOL
>did that. I don't know if they still do, but that's against the
>standards.
>
>See the section "recipients buffer" in the above URL, Ronald. (and
>perhaps you ought to hang onto the URL, so you don't guess and give
>out bad information next time)
My dear Chuq,
Regardless of whatever may be said in the draft replacement for RFC821,
the fact of the matter is that a mail server _is_ allowed to give a 4xx
response for any bloody RCPT TO to that it cares to provide that response
to.
I have one MTA on one of my systems set to give 4xx codes for all RCPT TOs
after the first one.
Can you connect to that and tell me (or anyone) definitively, whether you
are getting 4xx responses to your second and subsequent RCPT TOs because
I have too small of a RCPT TOs buffer or whether you get those responses
only because my MTA just doesn't feel like accepting mail for the second
and subsequent (requested) recipients right now?
I don't believe that you can definitively tell the difference from the
outside, one way or the other, so from the point of view of an external
SMTP client, my MTA may well be within spec, even if it never gives a
2xx response for any second/subsequent RCPT TO. If pressed, I will claim
that it IS within spec, and you, as an SMTP client, will NOT be able to
disprove that assertion.
P.S. This is NOT a hypothetical. I do indeed run Sendmail on one box
with MaxRecipientsPerMessage configured to 1.
P.P.S. Please don't YOU give out bad information next time.
-- Ron Guilmette, Roseville, California ---------- E-Scrub Technologies, Inc.
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