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Re: [Asrg] DNSBL and IPv6

2012-10-25 06:12:25
On 25/10/2012 04:00, Steve Atkins wrote:
On Oct 24, 2012, at 7:48 PM, "John Levine" <johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com> wrote:

Depends what your intentions are.  If you're trying to do listwashing, you
may wall see DNSBL listings rather than bounces.  I like VERP just fine and
my lists use it, but I do get back FBL reports that are munged to the point
where I can't tell who complained.  But they rarely munge the IP.
People trying to avoid listwashing will learn to munge the bottom bits of any
IPv6 address.
Well, maybe.  Personally, I think the threat of listwashing is overstated.
The really slimy senders have lists so dirty that no amount of washing will
clean them.

But anyway, I'm seeing a lot of assertions about how IPv6 mail will work,
and precious little running core or simulations.  As always, anyone want
to do some, you know, research?
It's mostly dependent on how IPv6 addresses for mailservers (legitimate and
otherwise) will be allocated, and how much IPv6 will be used for inter-domain
email delivery. Do we have any data, or researched speculation, about that
to work from?

I actually think getting any *useful* data about this would be very tricky at the moment, if not impossible.

I know that we can't use IPv6 anywhere. We have 4 broadband connections with different suppliers, and none support IPv6 yet, and the data centre we use for our servers also doesn't support IPv6 yet. I guess lots of people are in the same situation, especially smaller companies. This probably means that spammers in general won't be using IPv6 yet - would it be worth their hassle, given that most of their 'customers' won't have it. So, anyone who does have IPv6 MX servers will probably just be getting IPv6 mail from people like Google, and no one else.

So, it might be interesting to get data to see how widely IPv6 is used for email currently, but it's unlikely to be useful data to give us realistic ideas how spam will affect the IPv6 infrastructure in the future. eg, there may be virtually no IPv6 spam now, but it won't stay that way.



(My personal view is that IPv6 for widespread email use is well in the future. There is no huge advantage over IPv4 given that the number of MTAs is vastly smaller than the number of other Internet connected devices. For interoperability, everyone with an MTA will NEED an IPv4 address for now. There are complexity issues especially to do with security, hacking protection, spam filtering etc. So, I think most mail admins will be leaving IPv6 turned off until they need to turn it on - which may take a while, since it'll be a catch-22 situation. What may trigger it is if someone like Google decides to turn OFF all IPv4 support in their mail infrastructure, but I think that's unlikely for the foreseeable future...

MSAs may support IPv6 a lot sooner to support their IPv6 MUAs, but those won't have the spam issues.

I know this isn't an 'IETF approved' viewpoint, but it's mine, based on our customers)



-

Paul Smith Computer Services
Tel: 01484 855800
Vat No: GB 685 6987 53
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