MS/SA and DNS load (really: "relays.visi.com")?

[S JList]

    [ The following text is in the "ISO-8859-1" character set. ]
    [ Your display is set for the "US-ASCII" character set.  ]
    [ Some characters may be displayed incorrectly. ]

Hello.  I suppose this is not the most appropriate question for this
list, but: we are running MailScanner & SpamAssassin with few
modifications from the defaults.  Recently, our DNS servers started
going crazy, opening tens of thousands of query connections to reverse
domains in "relays.visi.com" from our MailScanner machine.

Not knowing too much, I was able to figure out that both MailScanner
(via RSL) and SpamAssassin (via RCVD_IN_RSL) were attempting to use that
site to check open relays, so I commented out the former in
spam.lists.conf and set the latter's "score" to 0 in
spam.assassin.prefs.conf.  The extra traffic to our DNS servers stopped
immediately.

I've done some searching on the Web to see if "relays.visi.com" has gone
quiet, but haven't found any confirmation.  Regardless,  that site is no
longer resolvable via our DNS (or via my ISP at home, for that matter).
Has anyone else seen such traffic being generated?  Is there a setting
I'm missing in MailScanner that would help these DNS lookups to die
after a timeout?  (I suspect this is also some failure on my part to
configure our named servers properly, so maybe I'd better check on the
BIND list.)

TIA if anyone can offer any suggestions.  We have been beyond pleased
with MailScanner (and I'm going to buy the book when I get back to work!).

S Joyce
Heidelberg College
sjlist at heidelberg.edu

------------------------ MailScanner list ------------------------
To unsubscribe, email jiscmail at jiscmail.ac.uk with the words:
'leave mailscanner' in the body of the email.
Before posting, read the MAQ (http://www.mailscanner.biz/maq/) and
the archives (http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/mailscanner.html).

Support MailScanner development - buy the book off the website!