[Mimedefang] Suggestions on rejecting relays that provide syntactically-invalid arguments to HELO/EHLO

Michael Sims michaels at crye-leike.com
Fri May 23 02:34:00 EDT 2003


Quoting Jeffrey Goldberg <jeffrey at goldmark.org>:

> > I'm also trying to decide what error I want to give people.  I should
> > probably give an error such as "Invalid argument passed to HELO" or even
> > "HELO requires fully qualified domain name or address literal", but I
> > hesitate to tell the spammers how to fix their spamware to bypass this.
> > I'm sorely tempted to just respond with a generic "Access denied"
> 
> There are good arguments either way.  I suspect that it is a philosophical
> difference.  Considering that the bounces that will be generated will
> probably not go to the spammer, and the fact that legit sites could easy
> be misconfigured, I would go with the former.

I've thought about it, and I agree with this.  If I just reply with "Access 
denied", a legitimate site might think that I have blacklisted them arbitrarily 
and may not bother to let me know about the problem.  I've decided to go with:

return('REJECT', "Invalid argument ($helo) passed to HELO/EHLO");

___________________________________________
Michael Sims
Project Analyst - Information Technology
Crye-Leike Realtors
Office: (901)758-5648  Pager: (901)769-3722
___________________________________________



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