Temporary fix installed to help Ameol users send email.

Ameol & Sending Email

2004 Apr 07 14:00 BST

Ameol users that send via the Wizards email server may have been experiencing difficulties following a server upgrade that occurred on Sunday.

Symptoms are the dialog will hang on the “Sending ‘subject'”.

The problem lies in the way Ameol has attempted to implement RFC821, the standard for sending email. Immediately after opening the connection to the server it fails to wait for the greeting message, which indicates whether the server is available to receive messages, and sends its HELO message regardless. This violation of the protocol by Ameol is unfortunate because this behaviour is also exhibited by a large number of spam-sending tools.

In light of this spam indicator and in order to correctly implement certain extensions to the mail protocol that allow for streamlined send without waiting for intermediate step acknowledgement authors of more recent versions of the various email server software packages have chosen to test and reject send attempts that violate the protocol.

As a temporary work-around we have patched the post.wizards.co.uk server to ignore this protocol violation for the opening greeting. Users of Ameol should now be able to send again but we would urge you to add your voice in the relevant support conferences to have Ameol fixed to be in compliance with the relevant RFCs. Our policy of ensuring the security of our servers by upgrading to more recent releases of the server software as they become available means that we cannot guarantee to maintain this particular patch in place indefinitely.

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