Re: Last Call: draft-klensin-rfc2821bis

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

in addition to that, the number of Internet hosts that want to support 
email is already a small fraction of the whole. this can be expected to 
get even more negligible in an IPv6 world where there are enough 
addresses to network every device you might ever want to control or 
monitor.

Henning Schulzrinne wrote:
> One of the problems I have seen first-hand is "disappearing" mail. 
> Example: A webserver sends outbound email directly, but doesn't want to 
> receive inbound email. The hostname leaks and mail gets sent to that 
> address, based  on the A(AAA) record. The mail is "received", but 
> disappears into some never-seen /var file. In that case, the sender 
> never suspects that anything is amiss; it would be much better if the 
> sender got an immediate "sorry, that domain name doesn't support email 
> service" error.
> 
> Even if you turn off sendmail, as someone has pointed out earlier, the 
> sending MTA will retry for several days until giving up, thus delaying 
> error notification that would be immediate otherwise in this particular 
> case.
> 
> You can obviously turn off sendmail local delivery, but many of the 
> standard web hosting (cPanel and kin, but also the standard RH mail 
> setup) arrangements don't make it particularly easy to have 
> outbound-only sendmail.
> 
> Thus, disabling AAAA checking seems to provide much cleaner error 
> behavior. The 'MX 0' proposals would achieve some of the same results, 
> but removing the AAAA lookup is default-safe, rather than requiring 
> operator action. It's too late to change the A behavior, but there 
> doesn't seem to be a reason to perpetuate this violation of the 
> principle of least surprise.
> 
> Henning
> 
> On Mar 29, 2008, at 10:34 AM, Theodore Tso wrote:
>> On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 10:16:10AM -0400, Keith Moore wrote:
>>> I think it is time to put an end to specious arguments.
>>>
>>> These standards get used for decades.  I don't think it's appropriate to
>>> cripple them because of some arrangement that happens to exist now from
>>> a few dysfunctional DNS providers.  Providers will get more flexible as
>>> the need becomes apparent, and domain owners who have problems with
>>> their DNS providers can change providers.  It's not difficult.
>>
>> So I must be missing something, probably because I deleted without
>> reading closely enough one of the earlier messages on this thread.
>> But please indulge me --- exactly what is the benefit of deprecating
>> the "A" fallback, and/or not doing a lookup on the AAAA record if the
>> MX record doesn't exist?  Is it the load on the nameservers that
>> people would believe would be reduced if we didn't do this?  Is that
>> really a problem?  Or is it something else?
>>
>>                     - Ted
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