what the heck do i do now?

Wed Jan 31 23:30:58 UTC 2007

Randy Bush wrote:
>> once upon a time, someone more insane than myself wanted to close an 
>> RBL and did so by replacing it with a wildcard entry.  we all hated
>> that since it caused a lot of mail to bounce.  (all mail that would
>> otherwise have been received by that RBL's subscribers, in fact.)  it
>> did however have the effect of causing the subscribers to reconfigure
>> their mailers to stop querying the now-dead RBL in question.  what's
>> the current thinking on this?
> 
> one problem with this is that the pain is not felt by the misconfigured
> folk, but by distant innocents.

I don't necessarily agree with that. First off, if you set up your mail 
server to use "maps.vix.com", you did it a LONG time ago, before scoring 
systems were all the rage. In all likelihood people are using this in a 
binary operation "accept or don't based on this DNSBL entry's return 
code". Flipping that switch will completely break mail for the offending 
site, and (in all likelihood) they'll notice it pretty quick and stop. 
Or they won't, in which case, they're pretty much an unattended domain, 
and who really cares what happens to them anyway?

I think that at some poing, Paul has a right to attempt to reclaim the 
sane use of his domain name, and considering how long the DNSBL in 
question has been out of commission, and people who use it should know 
that by now, the carrot needs to be traded in for a stick.

Cheers,
D

-- 
Derek J. Balling
Manager of Systems Administration
Vassar College
124 Raymond Ave
Box 0406 - Computer Center 217
Poughkeepsie, NY 12604
W: (845) 437-7231
C: (845) 249-9731
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