[PLUG] NO ptr record for lists.pdxlinux.org...

Michael C. Robinson michael at goose.robinson-west.com
Sun Sep 28 15:53:01 UTC 2003


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> Carla Schroder
> www.tuxcomputing.com
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About six sites didn't resolve.  I think part of the problem is that
you often have to ask the ISP to enter a reverse record because the
ISP controls it.  I bet 90+% of UCE comes from sites that don't have 
a PTR record.  Sites need to be required to have abuse addresses
that work.  If you don't figure out how to deny a connection for
spammers, you've lost to them.  I think a lot of people spam 
regardless of whether or not they get the reply they want based 
on perhaps as little as where you've been or even less than that.

One option is a program that tests email to see if it's spam then
email a reply back if it is deemed so indicating why.  Unfortunately,
the reply-to address can be wrong or in the case of some spammers, 
disabled because they are abusive.  I've seen cases where the abuse
address is disabled also, this is true for yahoo.com.  I block 
yahoo.com now because I get spam from it and can't complain about
it.

At ftp://ftp.robinson-west.com I have rfc2505, rfc2505.txt, which
states that we should all be running PTR records and check for
them with our mail servers as one measure to control and reduce
spam.  My ISP controls my public subnet's reverse zone where I 
contact them about what records I need for it.  For my private
dns I do forward and reverse dns for every computer on my lan.
It's not hard to do reverse zones if you can do forward zones.

Well I have some classmates in physics whose email addresses are
the following, domain only: hotmail.com, msn.com, and hotmail.com
again.  Are there reverse records for these domains or do I need
to do something special under postfix to let my classmates email
me so as not to abandon the deny unknown clients in the from
line protection?

     --  Michael C. Robinson




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