Arrogant RBL list maintainers

Thu Dec 10 04:35:43 UTC 2009

On Wed, 9 Dec 2009, Frank Bulk wrote:

> Two sides of an SP's coin: I want to maximize my e-mail servers'
> deliverability, so I make sure those have appropriately named PTRs and make
> sure that outbound messages aren't spammy; I also want to restrict

The point he was trying to make is that there is no standard for what 
those "appropriately named PTRs" should look like. He has forward/reverse 
that is perfectly ok according to standard (forward/reverse matches) and 
if he had a automatic dictionary for naming those IPs instead of putting 
the IPs there, things would be different.

If people want to make standards on how to put information into DNS for 
RBL use, they should take it to the IETF and make a standard out of it, 
not just ad-hoc create something of their own and expect everybody else to 
conform. If there is an "industry standard" (which the replies here seem 
to indicate), that should be written down and standardized by the people 
who actually make money out of it, in this case Trend Micro. This would 
remove the problem of having to maintain tens or hundred points of 
contacts for "what is dynamic dialup space" which is the problem right 
now as there are a lot of RBLs to deal with.

Creating a standard on what to put in WHOIS/DNS for 
dynamic/static/infrastructure would make a lot of sense, seems nobody is 
doing it though.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se