From: Greg A. Woods (no email)
Date: Mon Oct 15 2001 - 13:49:01 EDT
[ On Sunday, October 14, 2001 at 18:23:24 (-0400), Wietse Venema wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: some apparent problems with address parsing and SMTP response handling
>
> Yep. Postfix parses right to left. It's kind of hard to parse named
> groups left-to-right.
True enough.
I'll let you know if I come up with a better technique for smail! :-)
(though I don't really want to dive too far into smail's very convoluted
address parser!)
I wonder if maybe the original text shouldn't be included in a comment
in the header in this case. I was actually convinced I had not typed a
space until I went and looked in the FCC folder I've configured my
mailer to save every message I send to.
> > It then proceeded to hand off the resulting concatenated mess un-quoted
> > in the SMTP connection.
>
> That is the result of a choice between two evils.
>
> Early Postfixen quoted the localpart as "a at b"@c. If Postfix was
> the primary MX then it would bounce the mail because "a at b" is not
> a local iser.
>
> The problem was when Postfix was a backup MX and Sendmail the
> primary. It was found that the Sendmail boxen would strip the
> quotes, causing nasty open relay problems.
Oh my. I see. I suppose it is the lesser of two evils.... I'd have
been tempted to force the issue onto sendmail though! ;-)
> > Finally even more surprisingly postfix complains when it gets a 5xx
> > reply to the resulting errant RCPT TO:
>
> Postfix always send postmaster notice if it gets a 50x reply,
> because that is indicative of a protocol or syntax error.
That could cause quite a lot of unnecessary confusion, especially as
other mailers become more compliant with RFC 2821 which mandates 501 in
particular in several places where the parameters being complained about
are not under the control of the postmaster who will receive the notice.
Indeed even in this instance the error is user-induced, not really
software induced.
As far as I can tell smail's doing the right thing though in rejecting
the "a at b@c" form in RCPT TO:, since that is not a valid <forward-path>,
and I don't see a better response code to use in place of 501, though I
suppose I could invent a 505 or something.
-- Greg A. Woods +1 416 218-0098 VE3TCP <> <> Planix, Inc. <>; Secrets of the Weird <> - To unsubscribe, send mail to with content (not subject): unsubscribe postfix-users
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