[Python-Dev] 2nd thought: fully qualified host names (original) (raw)

Peter Schneider-Kamp nowonder@nowonder.de
Thu, 10 Aug 2000 23:29:28 +0000

Thomas Wouters wrote:

If this is for helo() and ehlo(), screw it. No sane mailer, technician or abuse desk employee pays any attention what so ever to the HELO message, except possibly for debugging.

Well, there are some MTAs (like Postfix) that seem to care. Postfix has an option called "reject_non_fqdn_hostname" with the following description:

""" Reject the request when the hostname in the client HELO (EHLO) command is not in fully-qualified domain form, as required by the RFC. The non_fqdn_reject_code specifies the response code to rejected requests (default: 504)."""

The submittor of the bug which was addressed by the patch I checked in had a problem with mailman and a postfix program that seemed to have this option turned on.

What I am proposing for smtplib is to send every name given to helo (or ehlo) through the guessing framework of gethostbyaddr() if possible. Could this hurt anything?

Of course, if anyone else needs a FQDN, it might be worth exposing this algorithm.... but smtplib doesn't seem like the proper place ;P

Agreed. Where could it go?

Peter

Peter Schneider-Kamp ++47-7388-7331 Herman Krags veg 51-11 mailto:peter@schneider-kamp.de N-7050 Trondheim http://schneider-kamp.de