In message <3E754204(_dot_)5040101(_at_)americasm01(_dot_)nt(_dot_)com>,
"Chris Lewis" <clewis(_at_)nortelnetworks(_dot_)com> wrote:
But in this case, it's different - Verisign _itself_ has spammed more
than once. No need to look any deeper than that.
[A simple google search for "verisign spam" will yield a number of
samples. ie: "partner marketing" with Roving Software. Or the "Vice
President, Customer Experience, Verisign" with Network Solutions spam. Etc.]
I still have a few of the spams they sent me, in my archives, if
anybody needs them for anything. (Apparently, if you were unlucky
enough to be foced into doing business with them back in the bad old
days when they ran the one and only domain name monopoly, they later
decided that that they had a ``prexisting business relationship''
with you which made it OK for them to spam you, even though you only
ever wanted a domain name registration, WITHOUT the side-order of
spam.)
As Vernon has commented a few times, there's no way to tell whether that
is legitimate or not. If I mailed from here using a hotmail address, is
it fake? You can't tell, short of determining whether I own the hotmail
address in question. Certainly, given things like the abysmal lack of
proper rDNS setups in small-business setups (eg: wanadoo, BT, China,
Korea, telesp) there's no way to tell what the right domain _is_ for a
given mail server.
Two points:
First, by and large Wanadoo space, BT space, and Telesp space almost all
_does_ have at least _some_ inverse DNS. It's only the jerks in China,
Korea, and other parts of the far east that never managed to make it
to the chapter on reverse DNS in their copies of the Cricket book.
Second, I have to disagree with the view that rDNS is necessary to
definitively identify a given mail server. If you can get the given
mail server to act as an SMTP client to you, then there is another
way.
In a nutshell, if some SMTP client says to you `HELO foo.bar.com' then
6 times out of 10 a forward lookup on `foo.bar.com' will get you the
IP address of that same SMTP client and another 3 times out of 10,
looking up the MX records for `bar.com' will get you the IP address
of that same SMTP client. So 9 times out of 10 you can accurately
associate a domain name with a given SMTP client, even in the total
absence of rDNS.
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