OT: Re: Greylisting & InterMail MTA?

An amusing end to this thread...  I received a reply from someone at Openwave 
(who asked not to be named ;-) which I append below.  In brief, a company 
worth $6 billion - see:

http://www.forbes.com/finance/mktguideapps/compinfo/CompanyTearsheet.jhtml?tkr=NTLI

- is running an MTA which is some 5 years old and pre-dates RFC 2821!  There 
must be a business lesson in there somewhere...

--------------------------------------------

The product was renamed from InterMail to EMail over 3 years
ago...

<...snipped...>

But to answer your implicit question.

The 4.1.x SMTP server was released in 1999 - before the official
existance of RFC 2821.  So NTL is runnning a VERY old version
of our software that we no longer support.  More recent releases
do support RFC2821.  NTL should be remedying this problem in 
near future as they upgrade to the latest release.

Subject: MTA InterMail not RFC2821 compliant
Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2004 09:59:58 +0000
From: John Sutton <john@scl.co.uk>
To: abuse@openwave.com
Cc: Mailadmin@ntl.com


Dear Sir/Madam

Please find below the text of an email sent to Mailadmin@ntl.com who are 
running your MTA:

InterMail vM.4.01.03.37 201-229-121-137-20020806

Best regards
John Sutton

-----------------------------------------------------
Subject: Mail servers are non-compliant
Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 15:09:28 +0000
From: John Sutton <john@scl.co.uk>
To: Mailadmin@ntl.com

Dear Sir/Madam

I write to inform you that your mail servers:

mta1-svc.business.ntl.com
mta2-svc.business.ntl.com
mta3-svc.business.ntl.com
mta4-svc.business.ntl.com
mta5-svc.business.ntl.com
mta6-svc.business.ntl.com
mta7-svc.business.ntl.com
mta8-svc.business.ntl.com

are not compliant with RFC2821 para 4.2.3 "Reply Codes in Numeric Order":

4yz   Transient Negative Completion reply
      The command was not accepted, and the requested action did not
      occur.  However, the error condition is temporary and the action
      may be requested again.

and RFC2821 para 4.2.1 "Reply Code Severities and Theory"

in respect of the meaning of, and action required when in receipt of, the 
reply code:

452 Requested action not taken: insufficient system storage

Your mail servers are not respecting this reply code at the end of the DATA 
phase as required by para 4.3.2 "Command-Reply Sequences" and in consequence 
are failing to either resubmit the message or to issue a non-delivery DSN to 
the sender.

I trust you will take action to remedy this shortcoming in your operations.

Yours faithfully

***************************************************
John Sutton
SCL Internet
URL http://www.scl.co.uk/
Tel. +44 (0) 1239 711 888
***************************************************