AOL blocking MailScanner messages!

[Dan Farmer]

Hopefully, AOL will keep this up despite the legitimate mail it will
block, as it will force many admins to step up and finish the setup of
their mail servers. Even better would be if yahoo, msn/hotmail, juno or
some other large site would also step up and implement this, increasing
the pressure.

Until then, there are many more legitimate servers that have bad or no
rdns than you can imagine. And the users on the other side whose mail
is bounced back (usually with a message indicating they should contact
their own server admins) will assume that since they can email all
these other places, you have set up your server incorrectly.

I had similar blocks in place for about a month after SoBig.F, and
educated 3 or 4 companies (ones my users told me were having problems)
about how to fix the issue with their rdns, but eventually the blocks
were removed for business reasons (any more than 0 legitimate emails
blocked was unacceptable). Good luck!

dan

On Dec 4, 2003, at 10:15 AM, Jeff A. Earickson wrote:

>>
>> However, this has nothing to do with RDNS at all, and nothing to do
>> with
>> what AOL is doing. AOL is implementing refusal of mail from servers
>> that do
>> not have a reverse DNS lookup for their IP. It's not rocket science
>> to do
>> in sendmail, i.e. something like this:
>>
>> http://www.cs.niu.edu/~rickert/cf/hack/require_rdns.m4
>>
>
> Does anybody else out there run this hack, or something similar for
> Exim/
> Postfix?  I'm giving it a test run on my mail server right now, and I
> wonder if I am shooting myself in the foot.  Virtually all of the
> rejections
> I see smell spammy to me.  Comments?
>
> Jeff Earickson
> Colby College
>