Re: [gentoo-user] Alternate Incoming Mail Server

[Grant Taylor <gtaylor@gentoo.tnetconsulting.net>]

On 4/11/20 4:13 PM, antlists wrote:
> Which was also a pain in the neck because it was single-threaded - if 
> the ISP tried to send an incoming email at the same time the gateway 
> tried to send, the gateway hung.

Ew.  I can't say as I'm surprised about that, given the nature of SMTP 
servers in the '90s.

I wonder what the licensing would have been to have one machine sending 
outbound and another receiving inbound.  Though that does assume that 
you could have multiple SMTP gateways connected to MS-Mail.

> You could pretty much guarantee most mornings I'd be in the server 
> room deleting a bunch of private emails from the outgoing queue, 
> and repeatedly rebooting until the queues in both directions managed 
> to clear.

Oy vey!

> The point is that when the server sends EHLO, it is *not* a *permitted* 
> response for the client to drop the connection.
> 
> That was the specification for ESMTP - the client should reject EHLO, 
> the server tries again with HELO, and things (supposedly) proceed as 
> they should. Which they can't, if the client improperly kills the 
> connection.

Agreed.

> Which shouldn't have been a problem. ESMTP was designed to fall back 
> gracefully to SMTP. But if clients don't behave correctly as per the 
> SMTP spec, how can the server degrade gracefully?

I wonder how many Sun Sparc boxen were put between Microsoft mail 
infrastructure and the rest of the world in the '90s and '00s.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die