Bagel Belly Blog

I can't see any problems with that approach. The more extreme version - requiring servers to identify themselves correctly - causes all sorts of trouble. Machines with dynamic IP addresses (dial up, ADSL) and/or lousy OSes (guess) often don't know and don't bother to look up their own correct names. (Mind you, I don't know if there are many people trying to send mail direct-to-MX from dialups these days. Probably not). Servers with multiple names and/or IPs often don't have their DNS data correctly and completely entered, and, IIRC, some DNS clients don't deal with odd cases correctly.

Isn't life online fun?

Steve D: I do that from my powerbook - sending via it's local copy of postfix, which then does MX lookup and sends out - There have been some mailservers that have rejected me, but it does allow me to send to the vast majority of places, from the vast majority of places, including random hotspots without having to fiddle with my settings, or use auth'd smtp (don't have a problem with auth'd smtp, just don't use it). This also gives me the advantage of having a local log of all my sent mail.

On the original point that savs was making - yes, postfix is quite good like that - we use it on our current SMTP server at Paston, and find it pretty effective, combined with lots of other things.