the value of reverse address lookups?

Thu Apr 1 15:21:47 UTC 2004

On Wed, 31 Mar 2004 19:21:43 EST, "Douglas F. Calvert" <douglist at anize.org>  said:

> justification for this practice?  In my opinion it does not appear to
> increase the validity of the connection. But I may be missing something

It tells you that the connection is coming from a netblock managed by somebody
with enough clue and motivation to get PTR records right.  If the site can't
even get that right, they're probably lacking in logging/auditing and the like
as well.

As a result, it's a pretty safe bet that if your site policy says you'll go
looking for somebody if there's a problem with the connection, you might as
well drop the connection early on, because nobody's answering the cluephone at
the remote end...

As far as SMTP goes, it's surprising (barely) how often you get "MX points to myself"
errors back from sites that don't have a valid PTR either....

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