[Mimedefang] IMAP

[Joseph Brennan]

Ben Kamen <bkamen at benjammin.net> wrote:

> MS's lack of adherence to the protocol.


To bring this closer to Mimedefang, let's look at MS's adherence to
the smtp protocol.

Outlook, under some circumstance, understands a 550 permanent error to
mean try again forever.  At the present time we have a user whose PC
tries 6,000 times a day to send a message to our smtp server without
smtp auth, and it gets 550'd every time, and it has been doing this
for over a year.  The user says no error is shown on screen, and the
user cannot find the message in an outgoing queue.  Since the PC is
on a changing dynamic connection from an ISP, and since the user needs
to send other mail, we have not filtered by IP or sender address.

We currently have a few other cases of this, but they don't send as
many times daily.  Maybe it means the people don't have Outlook running
all day, or maybe it means something else.

In our case the smtp auth test is done by sendmail, but, look, it
*could* be implemented in Mimedefang, and then this would be on topic!

Joseph Brennan
Lead Email Systems Engineer
Columbia University Information Technology