On Mon, Aug 21, 2000 at 04:46:32PM -0700, Aaron L. Meehan wrote:
> Yes, well, in my experience the cons of blocking null senders far
> outweigh the pros. The vast majority of spam is sent with forged
> addresses, or take-your-pick blasted free email provider addresses.
> I've been trying to convice once particular NT ISP here in Oregon of
> this fact for nearly three years.
>
> How they can allow their users to send lots of mail--to such places as
> AOL, any network for that matter that has external mail gateways that
> forward to internal hosts--and when it bounces NOT know about it is
> beyond me. I think it must just be ignorance of how SMTP works.
I'm not sure if this is relevant here, but in my opinion every Postmaster
who intentionally refuses mail because of empty envelope senders should
get fired for incompetence.
Reason: This breaks one of the base concepts of Internet mail.
If you have configured your client correctly, and no disc crashes
come in the way, for every mail you send you either get an error or it
gets delivered (somewhere).
The empty envelope sender is prescribed for bounces (RFC 1123), and if
someone refuses such mails, he denies his users the information that
their mail has failed. Not to mention I find those thing in my double-
bounce folder (along with the spams). If I have time, I forward the mail
to the user and something unfriendly to the postmaster.
You can imagine what I think about MTA authors that even make this setting
the default.
Another mystery in this area is why some people think they must *relay*
these mails for everyone ...
The original question, however, was about
From: <>
in the header.
That, on the contrary, is illegal in RFC and a sure sign of spam.
Unfortunately, you only see it when you have taken the mail (in standard qmail).
Jost
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