Re: Last Call: draft-klensin-rfc2821bis: closing the implicit MX issue

At 21:39 -0400 on 04/16/2008, Henning Schulzrinne wrote about Re: 
Last Call: draft-klensin-rfc2821bis: closing the implic:

>This decision raises a somewhat larger issue, namely whether 
>deferring to implementor desires is always the right thing to do. 
>Compared to implementers, there are many more users and system 
>administrators. For the reasons discussed earlier and alluded to 
>below, they now lose in having poorer error handling and more abuse. 
>I thought standards writers and implementer were supposed to serve 
>end users (and maybe the large number of people having to install 
>and manage things), not the other way around. Maybe this is another 
>instance of the oft-bemoaned absence of operators from the IETF 
>discussion. End users seem to be even more absent, even indirectly.
>
>Henning

How an implementor writes their code is ONLY relevant if the people 
responsible for maintaining the DNS fail to supply MX records that 
point ONLY at the hosts who are running MTAs. So long as they DO 
supply these MX records (and these records supply a IPv4 connected 
MTA that will accept [and possibly relay to an IPv6-Only MTA] email 
for the FQDN) the issue of if the SMTP code will look for both A and 
AAAA records in the absence of an MX is a non-issue. The need for 
this direct use of A/AAAA is only to support DNS administrators who 
for whatever reason (political, ignorance, or just laziness) fail to 
supply MX records.
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