Bug#270748: marked as done (exim4-config: "ignore private rfc1918 and APIPA addresses" causes problems)

[Andrew Pimlott]

On Thu, Sep 09, 2004 at 09:08:49AM +0200, Andreas Metzler wrote:
> On 2004-09-09 Debian Bug Tracking System <owner@bugs.debian.org> wrote:
> > It does so to avoid delivering e-mail to misconfigured domains to the
> > wrong place.
> [...]
> 
> To elaborate a little bit more: This is also very useful for working
> sender verification. - It is a rather common way to disable e-mail
> delivery for domains by having an A-record pointing to private address
> space. If ignore_target_host is not set exim will happily accept mail
> with 'mail from: x@thisbrokendomain' but a bounce-message (if one was
> generated) could not be delivered (no root to host) and would be
> frozen, stuck in the queue. 

That seems like a strange method of "disabling" mail for a domain; at
least it would be better to use a single special address (eg 0.0.0.0)
rather than overloading (abusing) the whole private range.  But I'll
take your word(s) that this is an issue in the real world.  Thanks for
the explanation.

Andrew