Hi. It has long been my personal belief that, in its operation of various of its own services on the Internet the IETF should adhere closely to its own standards. If we do not do so, we lose all credibility in recommending to others that they follow our standards. This practice has been referred to in many discussion threads over the years as "eating our own dog food". It has recently come to the attention of several of us, via an extended discussion on the SMTP list, that the IETF email servers are rejecting all SMTP connections whose EHLO commands contain IP address literals. While the text describing the appropriateness of use of IP literal is RFC 5321 is more complicated than it probably ought to be, the discussion in Section 4.1.4 of that document seems quite clear that an SMTP server MUST NOT reject a message simply because an IP address literal (or a domain name that does not point to a host) is used. Those interested in the niceties of that issue should review the correspondence on the ietf-smtp@xxxxxxxx list and comment there if appropriate. A ticket ( [www.ietf.org/rt #282782] ) was generated early in the month about the ietf.org mail servers apparently rejecting messages with IP address literals in the EHLO field. The rejection is accompanied by a reply message that appears to be inappropriate in multiple ways; again, those interested should see the ietf-smtp list for an already-extensive discussion. The Secretariat responded by indicating that all such addresses were being rejected and that the rejection was occurring under instructions from IETF leadership, instructions that were reaffirmed after the ticket was filed. Whatever the problem is, and indeed, whether there is a problem, the Secretariat is therefore blameless. I suggest that the IETF has a problem. The purpose of this note is _not_ to evaluate the underlying technical issues, what should be done about them, or whether the text in RFC 5321 should be improved. Those, it seems to me, are topics for the ietf-smtp list. They have been discussed there at length and presumably will continue to be discussed there. It is whether there is consensus among IETF participants that "the leadership" (I presume whatever bodies, individuals, or their designees are relevant) should have the authority to instruct the Secretariat to violate an IETF standard without consultation of appropriate experts within the community (presumably on relevant mailing lists), evidence of IETF rough consensus, and/or Internet Drafts that specify alterations to the relevant standard(s). I also don't want to cast blame about decisions of the past, only to understand what the process is for giving instructions to the Secretariat (or approving their suggestions) is now and whether IETF conformance to IETF standards is something we care about for the future. john
