Mail PTR Records

[Richard Frovarp]

Peter Farrow wrote:
> Matt Kettler wrote:
>> mikea wrote:
>>> On Mon, Mar 03, 2008 at 01:15:21PM -0600, Nathan Olson wrote:
>>>> It's not RFC-compliant.
>>>
>>> As has been mentioned elsethread, a number of techniques which are 
>>> increasingly necessary for survival are not RFC-compliant.
>>> Many RFCs were written when the Internet was kinder, gentler, and MUCH
>>> less dangerous than it is now. They have not changed, though the 'Net
>>> certainly has. Blind adherence to them in the face of evidence that 
>>> that adherence opens windows of vulnerability is not necessarily dood
>>> or wise.
>>
>> Well, that alone isn't a good reason to blindly toss RFC's aside. 
>> Some requirements of the RFCs are there for damn good reasons.
>>
>> However, in this case I suspect the activity isn't even a violation 
>> of an RFC, and not having a PTR record clearly violates their 
>> recommendations (albeit not their requirements).
>>
>> In general, it's really easy to claim something isn't complaint with 
>> the RFCs without any evidence to support it. We should all take such 
>> suggestions (including those generated by me) as unsubstantiated 
>> opinions until proven otherwise..
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1912
>
> Its an RFC to have a matching forward and revserse DNS lookup, so not 
> having one or a mismatched one is a violation of RFC1912
>
> To quote, verbatim,
>
> "Every Internet-reachable host should have a name. The consequences of 
> this are becoming more and more obvious. Many services available on 
> the Internet will not talk to you if you aren't correctly registered 
> in the DNS. 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."
>
> So you can legitimately bounce the email if the sending host has bad 
> forward/reverse DNS...
>
> Regards
>
> Pete
>
What does "should" mean? should vs shall vs must isn't always the same 
thing.