Hi,

I was investigating a rejected e-mail that was sent with the following
error message:

NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[46.248.167.50]: 504 5.5.2
<taiwangun-1>: Helo command rejected: need fully-qualified hostname;
from=<w...@tajeb.atomstore.pl> to=<myem...@mydomain.com.pl> proto=ESMTP
helo=<taiwangun-1>

It was rejected, because I have reject_non_fqdn_hostname set in my
postfix. Sending HELO (not EHLO) with a non-fqdn hostname seems wrong
and I wanted to find specific RFC that governs that. Here's what the man
page for postfix says:

  Reject the request when the HELO or EHLO hostname is not in fully-
  qualified domain or address literal form, as required by the RFC.

Sadly, it does not cite specific RFC. So I kept digging. Here's what I
found. RFC1123, section 5.2.5 says:

  The sender-SMTP MUST ensure that the <domain> parameter in a
  HELO command is a valid principal host domain name for the
  client host.

But then there's this:

   However, the receiver MUST NOT refuse to accept a message, even if
   the sender's HELO command fails verification.

My interpretation is that with reject_non_fqdn_helo_hostname, postfix
violates that MUST NOT. Is my interpretation correct? If that is so,
perhaps docs should be updated pointing that out. I very well understand
why people may want to use that option (I use it myself). It's just a
matter of the docs being a bit misleading with the "as required by the
RFC" part.

Thoughts?

If that makes any difference, my postfix is 2.11.3 running on Debian.

Tomek Mrugalski

p.s.
I'm absolute beginner with SMTP, but have quite a bit of experience with
IETF and RFCs.

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