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Date:      Thu, 14 Sep 2006 06:40:22 +0300
From:      Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr>
To:        Matthew Seaman <m.seaman@infracaninophile.co.uk>
Cc:        questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: sendmail and hosts_access(5)
Message-ID:  <20060914034022.GD74348@gothmog.pc>
In-Reply-To: <45083857.40405@infracaninophile.co.uk>
References:  <45082E5C.5040503@daleco.biz> <20060913163722.GA62734@gothmog.pc> <45083857.40405@infracaninophile.co.uk>

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On 2006-09-13 17:56, Matthew Seaman <m.seaman@infracaninophile.co.uk> wrote:
> hosts.allow triggers special behaviour with sendmail.  Unlike other
> services which just close the connection immediately, with sendmail
> what happens is that it will accept the connection, let the sender
> attempt to send e-mail, but then respond with a 500 'permanent
> failure' code.
>
> The reason for that is fairly simple: if a MTA gets no answer when
> trying to connect to a server and deliver e-mail, then the standards
> say it should requeue the message and try again for up to 5 days.  The
> only way to get the sending MTA to give up immediately is to issue a
> SMTP 500 error code.

Ah!  I see now.

Thanks for taking the time to write this cool, detailed explanation.

Now I know one more thing about Sendmail :-)




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