[69155] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: disabling SMTP
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Eric A. Hall)
Sun Mar 28 11:20:15 2004
Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2004 10:19:47 -0600
From: "Eric A. Hall" <ehall@ehsco.com>
To: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <Mahogany-0.66.0-20900-20040328-105716.00@averillpark.net>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
On 3/28/2004 9:57 AM, Richard Welty wrote:
> before i write an extended explanation of why i don't like this
> idea much, i'd very much like to hear some of the motivation
> behind the proposal.
It wasn't a proposal, it was a request for data. My own local data
suggests that HELO is almost exclusively used by malware agents (modulo
the internal appliances and user agents, which is why I referenced the
local exceptions). I'm mostly wondering how representative that is. It
might be feasible for some of us to disable legacy SMTP entirely.
Nothing is universal, of course, and what works for me and my domains
obviously wouldn't work for ~Hotmail or other large-scale providers. But
since I don't manage those networks, they are not part of my local
decision process either.
--
Eric A. Hall http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/