At 03:17 PM 2/18/97 -0800, you wrote:
>Vladimir Gabrielescu <vgabriel@lochaber.rutgers.edu> writes:
>
>In my opinion, EXPN and VRFY are excess interactions that don't
>contribute to the overriding goal of an MTA: Transporting E-mail.
>Any information about whether a host can deliver to an address can
>be found in the response to the smtp "RCPT TO:" command. EXPN and
>VRFY are unnecessary to the actual transport of mail, so a mail
>transport agent shouldn't be required to support them.
Nevertheless, there are, I have found, times where this extra feature
is *very* useful from an administrative point of view. Our company
maintains aliases for our users in the form fmlast@switch.com, which I
now happen to maintain. When I picked this up, many of the alias where
using only initials, and pointing at machines that I didn't have access
to (the function changed groups, also). Some of these machines didn't
implement finger, but almost all of them implemented VRFY. So, I was
able to write a script which processed the Sendmail alias file they
were in, and find out who had what alias for 95% of the names (around
400) that existed at that time. This saved me a *lot* of time on the
phone, so that I could create aliases in the full format.
Now, on a monthly basis, I run this sort of script to identify aliases
that need changed, as of course with the dynamic nature of our workplace,
users are sometimes moved to different machines, and the people involved
forget they need to tell me about it :) I should certainly not be able
to support the user email community as well if VRFY was not implemented
on most of our internal machines. I believe we were asked to give
real-life examples of difficulties that one might have with QMAIL; well,
this is such an example. Maybe not a show stopper, but none the less a
difficulty.
-------------------------
John C. Ring, Jr.
jcring@switch.com
Network Specialist
Union Switch & Signal Inc.
>Vladimir Gabrielescu <vgabriel@lochaber.rutgers.edu> writes:
>
>In my opinion, EXPN and VRFY are excess interactions that don't
>contribute to the overriding goal of an MTA: Transporting E-mail.
>Any information about whether a host can deliver to an address can
>be found in the response to the smtp "RCPT TO:" command. EXPN and
>VRFY are unnecessary to the actual transport of mail, so a mail
>transport agent shouldn't be required to support them.
Nevertheless, there are, I have found, times where this extra feature
is *very* useful from an administrative point of view. Our company
maintains aliases for our users in the form fmlast@switch.com, which I
now happen to maintain. When I picked this up, many of the alias where
using only initials, and pointing at machines that I didn't have access
to (the function changed groups, also). Some of these machines didn't
implement finger, but almost all of them implemented VRFY. So, I was
able to write a script which processed the Sendmail alias file they
were in, and find out who had what alias for 95% of the names (around
400) that existed at that time. This saved me a *lot* of time on the
phone, so that I could create aliases in the full format.
Now, on a monthly basis, I run this sort of script to identify aliases
that need changed, as of course with the dynamic nature of our workplace,
users are sometimes moved to different machines, and the people involved
forget they need to tell me about it :) I should certainly not be able
to support the user email community as well if VRFY was not implemented
on most of our internal machines. I believe we were asked to give
real-life examples of difficulties that one might have with QMAIL; well,
this is such an example. Maybe not a show stopper, but none the less a
difficulty.
-------------------------
John C. Ring, Jr.
jcring@switch.com
Network Specialist
Union Switch & Signal Inc.