Funny 220 response code...

[Louis Mamakos]

The SMTP server I wrote for our UNIVAC 1108 mainframe 30 years ago would say something like:

220 UMD2.UMD.EDU Greetings programs!

This was the era of the original "TRON" movie, and the quote was extracted from the movie.  It seemed a good fit, since as you pointed out, only other programs are intended to see those messages.  I feel sad inside that I have seen them many, many times myself.

(The server in question is out of spec; the first "word" of the 220 response is required to be the name that the server identified itself as, and **** doesn't count.  That's been true since the original RFC-821 document from way back then.)

louie
wa3ymh


On Mar 1, 2013, at 7:35 PM, Howard Cunningham <howardc at macrollc.com> wrote:

>  
> I spend much of my day looking into various email problems for our customers.  I was working on one today and came across an interesting log entry.
> 
> When our server sends a message and initial connection is made and the remote sends out a "220" SMTP response code.  Usually it's just the official host name of the server, but some send out all kinds of spam and security warnings.   Some US Government servers give out a couple of pages of warnings via a 220 code.  Nobody ever sees these codes unless they have access to the server logs or manually telnets to the server... the code is not included in a message header.  Anyway to get to the point... a user needed to know if a message was actually delivered so I checked the log (and it was delivered).   The 220 SMTP response code from whoever runs the server made me laugh:
> 
> 13:12:01 [41241] Connection to 64.136.173.100:25 from 72.9.X.X:63739 succeeded (Id: 51)
> 13:12:08 [41241] RSP: 220 **** COMMODORE 64 BASIC V2 ****                                             64K RAM SYSTEM @ 38911 BASIC BYTES FREE              READY.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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