Address Assignment Question

Jérôme Nicolle jerome at ceriz.fr
Mon Jun 20 22:09:25 UTC 2011


2011/6/20 David Miller <dmiller at tiggee.com>:
> OK.  I'll bite.  What particular "internet best practices" are Spamhaus
> trampling on?

RBL's are often seen as an "easy solution" to a quite complex problem.
Most mail administrators are relying on them so blindly that some may
forget to evaluate an RBL's pertinence regarding their particular
needs.

Providing such an "easy" way to avoid learning how to provide your
mail service definitely has a bad influence for the overall quality of
mail services. That's a first negative impact : letting noobs think
they can manage a mail server because "the magic RBLs seems to solve
my major issue" without looking to further side-effects.

Next in line, RBL managers don't even try to contact abuse@ or
postmaster at . So mail admins can't use them as a way to improve their
setups. Well, of course, it probably started with large corporation
routing ther abuse at bigestrmailserviceonearth.com to /dev/null, but
that's not the point : if you pretend to improve mail services, do it
right : use abuse@ and postmaster@ before blacklisting (note : botnets
sending from forged domains have to be considered differently of
course, but the rDNS check often fits that part quite well).

Last but not least, some RBLs are extorsion scams requiring one to pay
to get it's inetnum removed from any blacklist. It might be just an
incentive to help a non-profit charity cause, it still smells like a
mafia-related scam to me.

Let the RBLs' maintainers clean up their front doors before asking for
any legitimacy. Right now, relying on them is either stupidity or
lazyness. But if you can point me to any serious organisation
providing a real value-added service maintained by real professionals,
those who performs thorough checks _before_ putting a legitimaite mail
server in a blacklist, then i'd enjoy benchmarking it on a test
domain. Just let me doubt it'll be of any good regarding how
efficients is a properly managed mail server with just a few tech
tricks.



-- 
Jérôme Nicolle
06 19 31 27 14




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