On 6-May-2009, at 08:50, Charles Gregory wrote:
On Tue, 5 May 2009, Mark wrote:
Only several posts ago you had never even heard of SMTP AUTH....

I mentioned it in my original post. But let's just ignore this small factual error and continue....

No you didn't. The string 'auth' does not appear in your original email <alpine.lrh.2.00.0904301351030.23...@barton.hwcn.org> nor does your original message contain anything that is remotely similar to SMTP AUTH.

... or how folks generally solve their roaming user problem by means of having them connect to 'submission' port 587.

Granted. And upon being informed of this new development,

Submission is not new, it is only new *to you*. It may be new in the way that UUCP is 'old', that's about it.

I indicated my approval of the idea, and that I would be implementing it. But it didn't address the rest of the 'needs' I expressed....

The only needs you expressed was some way of creating an email address specific SPF list using DNS and of avoiding 'callback'.

Saying "that is bad" or "that is good" gives me NOTHING on which to make my *own* less-ignorant judgement in future.


You posted an idea without, obviously, doing actual research. You were quite vocal and bellicose in your defense of this idea in the face of several quite knowledgeable people telling you it was a bad idea. Granted, the first replies were more in the vein of 'do this instead' and 'this is the right way to do it', but you continued to insist you wanted some entirely new thing. It was at this point that people said, "no, this is stupid", before that Matus and Jonas and others were simply trying to point you in the right direction.

The person who told me about 587 wasn't particularly nice. But he was VERY informative. So I thank him for it. :)

Really?  i beg to differ:

On 4-May-2009, at 10:17, Matus UHLAR - fantomas wrote:
The mail can be sent using other ports, 587 is well defined for mail
submission and 465 can be user for the same reason (with SSL) as my company does. However submitting mail via other ports should require authentication,
and if anyone does not, it's completely their problem.

Unless by 'not nice' you mean 'failed to blow the requisite smoke up my ass' that was a perfectly polite and non-hostile reply.

"The netload of DNS lookups for individual addresses would overtax the DNS caching (or bandwidth)?"

But that isn't even WHY it's a bad idea. It's a bad idea for many reason, including that one, but that one is nowhere near the top of the list.

That's the answer I was really expecting. But I am *ignorant* of those facts, and that's why I asked.

You asked a question, were presented with *the right way* to solve your problem. You did not want the *right way* you wanted to talk about your suggestion to fix your problem and ignore everyone else telling you how to actually fix it.

Way I see it, your idea was shot down....

No, my idea was DISMISSED.

because it was a *STUPID* idea based on your ignorance. Sorry to be so blunt, but there it is. You were given the right solution several times in the first 5 or 6 replies.

Small difference. An idea is 'shot down' when someone presents rational arguments and reasons for WHY it is bad.

You know, that's pretty self-involved and self-aggrandizing. You are assuming that your idea merited that sort of time, thought, and effort. It didn't. It was a ridiculous idea on its face and anyone who works with mailservers would know that. It's much as if you posted that you though all engine blocks should be made of chocolate. Do you think anyone is going to take the time to explain WHY chocolate is a bad idea for an engine block, or are they going to DISMISS your idea and say, "No, the right materials for engine blocks are well established. Engine blocks are made like THIS."

Sure, I missed the 587 thing, but once I googled for it, I could see that it is still relatively new,

Yeah... let's see, I setup submission on my mailserver in... um... 1997? 1999? I know it dates back to at least RFC2476 (1998) but I think it's older than that, perhaps unofficially, but it is still documented more than a decade old.

not even yet programmed as any standard into MUA's

Yeah, that's completely false.

I'm not embarrased to have missed it.

Yes, well you *should* be.

It wasn't a gross error. Again, this is WHY I ask the questions on this group.

but you IGNORED those answers and insisted that you had a good idea.

.... there's always the bloke-du-jour who comes up with a 'brilliant' new, often elaborate, plan to do things differently. And usually, like in your case, they haven't done their homework first.

More arrogance. I *did* do some homework.

There is absolutely zero evidence of that in your initial post.

decided to forego on finding out how people have been solving these issues for the last ten years.

If the issues were "solved" then why do they still exist?

Because there are people like you in charge of mailservers? I mean, that's PART of the reason at least. "Damn those remote users, we can't let them have access to our precious mailserver" is a very bad attitude and one of the things that keeps SPF from being more useful.

Why isn't everyone useing SPF and happy? It's not just ignorance and inertia. It's situations like the one I described.

Caused by laziness and the inability to move your mailserver into the 21st century. Are you still running SpamAssassin 2.0 also?

A lazy choice is still a choice, and if people are going to make them, then it stands to reason that we need to find ways to work *with* the way people think/act

And yet your proposal was to force YOUR USERS to reconfigure their MUA *AND* a DNS record every time their IP changes. My in-laws DSL IP changes every six hours. That is not working with people, that is working actively *against* them.

rather than continue to just arrogantly insist they do it 'our' way.

Yes, damn those helpful people for giving you a SOLUTION instead of arguing about the merits of your stupid idea.

Firstly, you keep *saying* it would be 'complicated' and 'hard to implement',

I'll go further. It would be complicated and IMPOSSIBLE to implement and would create massive security holes and would be a completely worthless anti-spam indicator. It defies the very first rule on 21st century email, which is that the server responsible for sending mail has to *know* who the sender is.

which I suppose is a little bit better than just saying 'bad', but not much. You don't say HOW it would be so.

That because the vast majority of people on this list, at least replying to you, know by looking at it that it's senseless and that you are going about solving your problem the exactly ass-backwards way. So they provide you with the RIGHT way, and you get petulant because they aren't responding to your 'clever' idea.

It has the sound of someone *assuming* that it would be so. I haven't bothered to contradict this notion, but truthfully, I wouldn't advance the idea if I didn't have a feeling that it *might* be easy to implement.

Which only goes to show that 1) you've learned nothing 2) you don't have a clue what you are talking about and 3) you've ignored the people who quite obviously know a lot more than you do [and just to be clear, I am talking about Matus and Mike and others, not even myself]. As far as I am concerned, the mere fact that it is user-hostile means that it is a complete non-starter and not worth considering. Much as I would not consider an idea that required, say, submitting a blood- sample for every email you send, or a pay-to-send scheme, or a prove- you-love-me scheme. these are all stupid ideas, but only one of them is MORE stupid than yours. I don't even need to look for another reason, but trust me, those other reasons are Legion.

Well, this thread is going to end anyway, because according to Occam's logic, I can sure as asterisks tell that no one around here is really going to give me a serious reply.

Post a serious suggestion and you will get a serious reply. I posted a serious suggestion about the same time as your laughable one and, even though it looks like it's not likely to work--or at least not well enough to make it worth implementing, it got serious discussion for 25 messages or so.


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