Heads up for spamhaus.org problems

[Alex Broens]

On 8/20/2007 11:22 PM, Tim Boyer wrote:
> On Sun, 19 Aug 2007 22:02:01 -0400, Richard Potter <rpotter at rpcs.net> wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, Aug 20, 2007 at 12:34:23AM +0200, Raymond Dijkxhoorn wrote:
>>
>>>> Just doing a routine check here, and I have a few mail servers 
>>>> misbehaving. It
>>>> *appears* sendmail dnsbl to zen.spamhaus.org is timing out, and causing 
>>>> mail
>>>> delivery delays, or none at all.
>>>>
>>>> I'm going to discontinue spamhaus, and see what happens.
>>> Buy rsync from them. Most likely you fire a lot of lookups on their 
>>> servers and they started to ban high volume mailservers some time ago.
>>> We have seen this in a lot of places allready.
>>>
>>> May i ask how much mail are you processing daily?
>> Thanks for the reply Raymond.. I wasn't aware they were doing that. These
>> are low volume servers, less than 2,000 messages per day. Does that count
>> as "high volume" to spamhaus?
>>
>> Richard
> 
> "Use of the Spamhaus DNSBLs via DNS queries to our public DNSBL mirrors is free
> for low-traffic mail servers serving less than 100 users. Use of the Spamhaus
> DNSBLs by commercial or corporate networks, ISPs and ESPs, requires a
> subscription to Spamhaus's Data Feed service."
> 
> I'd be shocked if 2,000 messages per day counts as high volume.  That's 20
> emails per person per day.

no need to be shocked :-)

Spamhaus can't block your mail server from doing queries - it blocks 
your DNS' access to the root zone - so if you use a DNS which is 
querying Xmillion queries/day and your server is only doing 10000/day 
then the rest of the X/million+your 10000 makes he count which rates a 
block.

Alex