Re: Weird HELO's

[Tom Samplonius <tom@haven.uniserve.com>]

On Fri, 17 Feb 1995, James MacKinnon wrote:

> On Fri, 17 Feb 1995, Tom Samplonius wrote:
> 
> > 
> >   I've noticed that Sendmail sometimes issues a HELO command that looks 
> > like the following:
> > 
> > HELO gasmail@xmission.com
> > 
> > but all versions of zmailer reject it.  Isn't this contary to the RFC's?  
> > Does anyone know under what circumstances Sendmail does this?
> 
> It's pretty easy to mis-configure a vanilla sendmail (that host's 
> sendmail.cf file is badly configured :-)
> 
> Yes it's an invalid parameter to HELO, and smart mailer's (i.e. Zmailer)
> won't tolerate it:
> 
> HELO gasmail@xmission.com
> 501-        ^
> 501 Invalid `HELO gasmail@xmission.com' parameter!  Err: Spurious junk 
> after the DOMAIN in HELO/EHLO argument
> 
> what this means is that '@' is not allowed in a DOMAIN specification.
> The parameter for HELO is a DOMAIN, not an address
> 
> About the only thing you can do is notify the postmaster at that site.
> (really needs to be 'xmission.xmission.com' )

  The guy answering postmaster mail claims that it is my problem because 
my system is giving the error.  Sigh...

  It only appears to affect some mail from that site....I think it my be 
a mailing list/alias?

Tom