Heads up for spamhaus.org problems

[Tim Boyer]

On Mon, 20 Aug 2007 23:34:05 +0200, Alex Broens <ms-list at alexb.ch> wrote:

>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

Hah!  Of course.  That makes perfect sense.

-- 
tim boyer
tim at denmantire.com