att.net email issues?

Sat Jan 25 03:38:27 UTC 2003

On Fri, 24 Jan 2003 19:16:55 -0500 (EST) Sean Donelan <sean at donelan.com> wrote:
> Doesn't anyone else find it funny when people scream that ISPs should
> block ports and shoot people with misconfigured systems; yet when
> an ISP actually does enforce even a modest requirement; people start
> screaming how unfair or stupid that ISP is for doing that.

this isn't that simple.

if folks had been enforcing something like this all along, then most
everyone would have working rDNS and everything would be hunky dory.

unfortunately, it didn't work this way. lots of people have broken or
non-existent rDNS.

some years ago, because of the correlation between no rDNS and spam, i
tried a similar measure. the false positive rate was pretty impressive. my
experiment only lasted a couple of days before i decided that it was
unacceptably high. i don't think things are any better today.

maybe att's decision will somehow make the net a better place if they stick
to it. i won't bet against this.

however, the transition period will be more painful than i think they
realize. or perhaps they do realize how painful it will be and don't care.

personally, i'd be happier if they'd focus on abuse problems on their own
network. they don't seem to be doing much of a job of turfing spammers
among their customer base.

richard
--
Richard Welty                                         rwelty at averillpark.net
Averill Park Networking                                         518-573-7592
              Unix, Linux, IP Network Engineering, Security