You made my point. Cisco was "justly and publicly" criticized with "near-universal-derision" for not complying with the standard. Most companies want to avoid that. False derision is actionable in many jurisdictions. --Dean On Wed, 4 Jun 2003 Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote: > On Wed, 04 Jun 2003 11:54:03 EDT, Dean Anderson said: > > > Implementors are not the only users of standards. Businsess seek to > > purchase and sell "Standard" Services, and may receive just and public > > criticism for not providing the services they claim to provide. In some > > jurisdictions, this could conceivably be considered fraud, and/or unfair > > trade practices. So if a business (SMTP client vendor, SMTP server > > vendor, ISP, etc) claims to provide "Standard SMTP Service", and comply > > with the "SMTP Standard", to which RFC should they be held accountable? > > Given that the Cisco PIX claimed to have an SMTP implementation from the > very beginning, and they still sold lots of them, I don't think there's much > chance of leveraging a lawsuit over the distinction between 821 and 2821. > > (For those not familiar with the early PIX software, the best that can be > said about it is "near-universal derision". Cisco has, to its credit, fixed > all of the glaring bogosities that I'm aware of, so the current release of > software *is* at least a "plays well with others" SMTP). >