The state of static sites in 2013

iamnotaprogrammer.com

1 pointsudonim3 comments

"I’ve used multiple DNS services to attempt to set up stripping the www from my websites. WWW is a relic of a bygone age. In my opinion it kind of makes you look like a n00b if you have it."

Until you try to send mail from your domain and half of it bounces due to the stock sendmail setup. Stripping www out might be trendy but I can't say using it makes you a noob, but making that statement does.

I reworded that bit. You're right that it made me sound like an ass.

How does the stock sendmail setup behave that assumes www.foo.com?

Stock sendmail will try to lookup the sender domain, if the sender domain has an A record for @, it will use that instead of the MX to determine if the mail is coming from a legitimate source or not. It was a derpy spam prevention method started years ago, I doubt its been removed, but I also don't use sendmail a ton anymore so its possible its finally gone.

Also, a fair amount of the world is used to the convention of www.something.whatever so you'll have people complaining your site is down if you don't have www. Firefox will also sometimes prepend www to be "helpful" as well if there's some other typo in the URL (not a fan of that).

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