[Gllug] helo ehlo lhlo

[Joel Bernstein]

On Tue, Oct 11, 2005 at 10:17:25AM +0200, Martin A. Brooks wrote:
> Joel Bernstein wrote:
> >Or did you mean that one can give an EHLO and infer from the responses
> >if the server actually speaks ESMTP? You probably can. Still don't think
> >it's wise.
> 
> You almost have to.  There's no requirement for an ESMTP capable server 
> to advertise that it's ESMTP capable in the banner.  The only way to be 
> sure is to issue an EHLO and see if it's accepted, reverting to HELO if 
> it's not.

Aha. I did wonder. It seemed to me that ESMTP *should* be advertised -
there's very little risk IMO from exposing that your MTA can talk a
slightly more useful protocol - but that I knew that many servers
*don't* - I just wasn't clear whether they were in flagrant violation of
some RFC :)

I suppose a server which genuinely can't speak ESMTP will respond with a
500 error to 'EHLO foo.bar.com' anyway. So you can just try ESMTP and
fall back to SMTP.

/joel
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