Aptum refuses to SWIP

Fri May 5 17:04:59 UTC 2023

Forrest Christian (List Account) writes:

> I can't speak for aptum, but I'm curious as to why this is important to
> you?   I'm not trying to discount this at all,  just curious why this
> matters in the internet of 2023.

Two main reasons.

1) We are trying to set up internal peering with AWS, and they use
the rwhois info to validate that the addresses we want to route to
them are actually assigned to us.

2) We (Hushmail) often have to deal with overly zealous mail firewall
administrators (typically, state gov't medically-focused departments)
who have a bad habit of outright blocking any mail from a non-US
source.  But we also get this from general mail firewall appliance
vendors who maintain their own blacklist.  Being able to point them
at valid rwhois data to verify this mail is coming from a legitimate
email provider is (or has been) our first step in getting our mail
relays removed from those lists.

(1) is directly impacting our business right now.  (2) will rear its
head before long -- we usually run into those cases every three to
four months.

But the last time I looked, it's also ARIN's policy to require ISPs
(which Aptum is) to SWIP addresses in order to justify future requests
for address space.  I'm curious what will happen the next time they
ask for additional ip6 allocations.  Or maybe they have no growth
plans?

--lyndon