Re: header-munging

["D. J. Bernstein" <[e-mail]>]

> Neither one of these solves the real problem.

There's more than one real problem in the universe.


The problem I'm concerned with is a very real interoperability problem:
a crappy MUA talking to a fast MTA ends up spewing garbage into the net.

Right now this problem is solved by bilateral agreement: the MTA will
take the time to fix up messages from certain IP addresses. A separate
port would solve it by IANA agreement.


Another problem I've mentioned is a very real speed problem for one
common MTA: sendmail does a lot of DNS lookups to fix up messages from
clients that don't want any fixups.

The RELAY extension would solve this problem. An alternative solution is
for sendmail to stop doing the fixups by default; of course, this causes
interoperability problems, just as it does for fast MTAs.


You seem to be concerned with a third problem: the aforementioned crappy
MUAs often generate messages missing crucial information. (For example,
what does a user mean by ``to: eric@cs''?)

To the extent that this is a problem, the obvious solution is for the
MUAs to generate more information.


---Dan