Re: ORCPT and ESMTP

[mea@nic.funet.fi]

> I am running 2.99.48.  It is my understanding that handing off the ORCPT
> field of a RCPT TO smtp transaction is part of ESMTP.  Is it required?
> It would seem there are a lot of systems in the universe that do NOT handle
> this feature and I would like to turn it off in zmailer.  Can I?

	It is RFC 1891 defined DSN facility.
	The ORCPT data is not sent unless the remote systems report
	DSN facility in EHLO responses.

	Or you are referring to this kind of error reports ?

->> 501 <mmatteo@sacbee.com>... Syntax error in ORCPT parameter value (this is abnormal, investigate!)

	If you are, the problem appears to be faulty firewall from cisco;
	product called "cisco PIX" (http://www.cisco.com/pix):

	"Cisco's PIX Firewall, driven by world-class
	 marketing and distribution, has experienced
         phenomenal early success and could be in
         contention for a top spot in the firewall market.
	..."

	yeah, maybe, but it scrambles ORCPT parameter passed thru.
	("world-class marketing" means they can sell even junk..)

	The problem facility is called "Mail Guard" of which
	I presented some questions on Notifications -list
	last week (that was/is IETF list where the DSN extension
	was created)    Even some cisco people are on that
	list, and took my questions/bug-reports seriously
	(especially as Ned Freed and Keith Moore followed
	 me up with more examples of PIX failures.)

	Actual details on what goes wrong are rather long, and
	I would prefer to refer you to NOTIFICATIONS-wg archive.

> Second question:
>   How do people upgrade their zmailer?
>   Do they just untar the code on top of an existing source tree and
>   rebuild everything and reinstall everything?
>   Do you do this in pieces?

	Have you looked at what the INSTALL file tells about this ?
	Also do see what README.UPGRADING tells.

	Reinstalling everything might be worth of the work, but if
	you have local modifications in configurations/scripts, you
	will need to do more manual work to get things up again.

	To just install binaries, you do:
		make install-bin

	( oh yes, I do untar source into a new tree, or rename "zmailer"
	  to be "zmailer-12345" before configuring and compiling )

> Suggestions and warnings welcome.
> 
> /mrg

/Matti Aarnio <mea@nic.funet.fi>