AOL blocking MailScanner messages!

[Chris Trudeau]

There (in my interpretation) is no reference to reverse records in the
RFC cited below that address mail flow relative to PTR (reverse) records
anywhere.

The RFC clearly states:

   Make sure your PTR and A records match.  For every IP address, there
   should be a matching PTR record in the in-addr.arpa domain.  If a
   host is multi-homed, (more than one IP address) make sure that all IP
   addresses have a corresponding PTR record (not just the first one).
   Failure to have matching PTR and A records can cause loss of Internet
   services similar to not being registered in the DNS at all.  Also,
   PTR records must point back to a valid A record, not a alias defined
   by a CNAME.  It is highly recommended that you use some software
   which automates this checking, or generate your DNS data from a
   database which automatically creates consistent data.

That a PTR record should exist.  Unfortunately, it says that for every A
record, a PTR should exist.  While that IS valid, I'm not sure, I
understand how that relates to a configurable entry on almost every MTA
created.

Methinks the thread has taken a bad turn...and should either be brough
back on course or abandoned altogether.

CT


-----Original Message-----
From: MailScanner mailing list [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On
Behalf Of Res
Sent: Friday, December 05, 2003 5:21 PM
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: AOL blocking MailScanner messages!

Jeff,

On Fri, 5 Dec 2003, Jeff A. Earickson wrote:

> Y'all,
>    I ran Rickert's sendmail ruleset for about 6 hours yesterday, then
> removed it and looked at the 500 sendmail rejects that it generated
> for the "Fix reverse DNS" error.  I rejected emails from 364 unique
> IP numbers.  I wrote a script to do a whois on these numbers and the
> info was ugly.  Yes I was rejecting probable spam from APNIC, but I
> also zapped a lot of stuff from other universities, McGraw-Hill books
> and other publishers, Amazon (the original spammers!), IBM, the FAA
(!),
> etc.  I expect to hear some screaming about my experiment.
>
> While I think this is a great idea in theory, in practice it does a
> lot of collateral damage.  I'll let AOL reform the world before


Can you explain why we should operate non compliant mail servers? JUST
to
get mail from other non complaint mail servers?

Sure, RFC1912 is not law, but its there and its there for a good reason,
so do we now start to ignore other RFC's ? or just the ones we dont
like?

When these people get all there bounced mails they soon get the picture,
complain to their IT unit who in turn should get off there lazy asses
and
fix what should have been setup correctly in the first place!
There are just too many lazy incompetant idiots in the IT industry.

--
Regards,
Res
Network Administrator
Postmaster / Abusemaster / Flamemaster
http://www.ausics.net  Australian Hosting Services