Grrr NON-RFC Compliant Mail servers

[James McDonald]

I decided that maybe my adsl linked mail server wasn't on a reliable 
enough connection for my mail domain so I bought a bit of webspace to 
host my mail domain as soon as I did that I couldn't send mail to the 
lists.sourceforge.net mail servers and worse I wasn't getting notified 
about why.

Turned out to be the mail server wasn't accepting an rfc compliant "MAIL 
FROM: <>" command it was throwing an error before it could send the 
"VRFY james at jamesmcdonald.id.au" turns out mail servers need to be able 
to accept an empty(i.e. no senders address) MAIL FROM: because that in 
combination with VRFY is how they check for a valid email address.

Just another trap for the unwary.