Re: IETF Policy on dogfood consumption or avoidance - SMTP version

[S Moonesamy <[e-mail]>]

Hi John,
At 08:12 PM 15-12-2019, John C Klensin wrote:
>First of all, I read John's message too quickly and had
>forgotten that the rejection message attributing the problem to
>EHLO does not appear until after a RCPT command is sent.  So
>SM's test is the important one; John's just didn't go far
>enough.  There are also a number of issues raised by the error
>message.  The problem condition should not be attributed to RFC
>2821; it probably shouldn't refer to the "Helo command" when
>EHLO was used; it is, as suggested above, a policy matter and
>not a requirement of any IETF protocol specification; and, while
>the specification arguably permits it, accepting the EHLO and
>then rejecting the mail transaction only after processing the
>MAIL and at least one RCPT command is probably at least in bad
>taste.  Some of those issues suggest changes or clarification
>that should be applied when and if RFC 5321 is updated and
>replaced.  Most of them have been discussed, at length, on the
>ietf-smtp list; I assume the others soon will be.

The rejection is for policy reasons.  The error text stating that it 
is because of a "RFC violation" is incorrect.

>None of the above has much of anything to do with the key issue
>that I thought
>was worth raising on this list.  According to the response to
>the trouble ticket, the Secretariat was told to block mail
>transactions that used IP address literals in the EHLO command.
>No matter how pragmatically desirable that may be (see the
>ietf-smtp list for a discussion on that topic too), at least as
>I read it (and wrote it) RFC 5321 prohibits that rejection,
>making the IETF mail servers non-conforming to the standard.
>So, again, the first question for this list is whether we are
>comfortable with servers run in the IETF's name being
>non-conforming to IETF standards.  I see objections to that on

It does not look good when a SDO is unable to explain [1] why it is 
ignoring its own standard.

Regards,
S. Moonesamy

1. There is an initiative of the Dutch government: 
http://r.elandsys.com/r/94862  At first glance, it looks like there 
is something wrong with the server which was tested.  It takes a 
little more effort to interpret the results.