misc/85087: send-pr should prefer to use HTTP, rather than mail

[Giorgos Keramidas]

The following reply was made to PR misc/85087; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida at ceid.upatras.gr>
To: Bob Ippolito <bob at redivi.com>
Cc: bug-followup at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: misc/85087: send-pr should prefer to use HTTP, rather than mail
Date: Thu, 18 Aug 2005 16:54:40 +0300

 On 2005-08-18 12:02, Bob Ippolito <bob at redivi.com> wrote:
 >
 > I had attempted to send-pr last week, but it never went through.  It
 > turns out that the freebsd.org MTA won't accept mail from my server:
 >
 > Aug 11 23:45:57 go sm-mta[38236]: j7BCiYG9019787:
 > to=<FreeBSD-gnats-submit at freebsd.org>, ctladdr=<bob at go.mochibot.com>
 > (1001/1001), delay=18:01:22, xdelay=00:00:01, mailer=esmtp,
 > pri=3362068, relay=mx1.freebsd.org. [216.136.204.125], dsn=4.2.0,
 > stat=Deferred: 450 Client host rejected: cannot find your hostname,
 > [216.200.21.218]
 
 The problem is one that can be solved by properly configuring your DNS
 setup.  There is a very good reason why the MX of FreeBSD.org refuses to
 accept email from unresolvable addresses.  It saves us from a ton of
 spam mail :-)
 
 > Use send-pr from a machine where the MTA is misconfigured, the reverse
 > DNS isn't correct, etc.
 
 That's not a send-pr bug, neither an MX bug in FreeBSD.org, IMHO.
 
 > If send-pr could post via http://www.freebsd.org/send-pr.html, this
 > problem would go away.  It's a lot more likely that HTTP would go
 > through.
 >
 > This shouldn't be too hard to do with the existing shell script
 > infrastructure via curl, or a similar utility.
 
 Only this is not possible either.  The web-based bug submission form
 includes an image that is human-readable, but cannot easily be handled
 by a script.
 
 You should really look into fixing your DNS problems.  Posting email
 from an address that doesn't resolve properly these days is a bit silly,
 since many servers use DNS queries to filter out most of the "naive
 spammers who don't have valid forward & backward resolution set up
 correctly".  You'll have problems with other mail servers too, until you
 fix your DNS setup.