On Thu, 24 Oct 1996 15:20:38 EDT, you said:
> This first showed up with bounces from something called "PAS052".  The
> mail had passed from an operation called "nic.near.net" to "pas052".
> I suspect it is a large pharmaceutical company, and perhaps there are
> good reasons for this, but it is a bit worrisome.  Naturally, repeated
> mail to the various postmasters has had no result.
>
> Today another showed up: "GATEKEEPER" ... not "gatekeeper._somewhere_",
> just GATEKEEPER. Has anyone else seen this?  Does anyone know of a way
> to track these down?  Does Listserv have anything that will help?
 
Ahh yes.  Bozo nodes that don't fully qualify their domain names.
Personally, I just bit bucket them.  If they can't qualify their
domain name as required by RFC822, section 6.2.2 (which *only* came
out recently, as in August 13, 1982 ;) I dont have much sympathy for
them.  I haven't *quite* gotten so far gone that I've added a procmail
rule for myself, to delete them unread. ;)
 
The big offenders for this seem to be Sun systems - their software
(most notably Yellow Plagues^H^H^H^H^HPages and/or NIS) seems to be quite
picky about having hostnames match - with the end result that the admin
sets the hostname to be just "whatever", not "whatever.my-corp.com".
Unfortunately, many vendor sendmails don't bother checking if there's a '.'
in the hostname, and don't bother fixing this on the way out.
 
(For the anal retentive, it's usually a failure of Sendmail.cf to
make sure that the $j macro is in fact equal to $w.$m)
 
If you're *really* interested in  tracking down the offenders, go look
at the Listserv  logs, get the time/date stamp  of when it showed  up,
and chase back in your SMTP or  Sendmail logs (as appropriate for your
platform).  With any luck, you'll find  an inbound connection from the
site a few seconds before, be  able to get  the *real* hostname and/or
IP address, and figure out how to send them a nastygram.
 
I'm appending the verbiage from RFC822, in case anybody wishes to send
it to the offenders. ;)
 
/Valdis
 
From RFC822:
 
     6.2.2.  ABBREVIATED DOMAIN SPECIFICATION
 
        Since any number of  levels  is  possible  within  the  domain
        hierarchy,  specification  of  a  fully  qualified address can
        become inconvenient.  This standard permits abbreviated domain
        specification, in a special case:
 
            For the address of  the  sender,  call  the  left-most
            sub-domain  Level  N.   In a header address, if all of
            the sub-domains above (i.e., to the right of) Level  N
            are  the same as those of the sender, then they do not
            have to appear in the specification.   Otherwise,  the
            address must be fully qualified.