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Re: draft-delany-nullmx-00.txt

2005-04-07 04:28:54

I haven't had my morning coffee... so excuse any stupidity.

On Apr 6, 2005, at 7:52 PM, Douglas Otis wrote:

Is there a mailing list discussing this draft?

The null mx record structured in this manner:
        *               IN      MX      0       .


My initial thoughts are that this is a bad idea. Studies by CAIDA and Paul Vixie have shown that the roots already receive more crap than legitimate traffic. I'm asking around within our DNS team to see what they think.

My comments:

1) For most modern mail servers that do not understand the null mx record, this will result in both an A and AAAA query against the root. 2) There are a lot of pieces of anti-spam software that do not distinguish between NODATA and NXDOMAIN and there are a lot pieces of anti-spam software that do. Since this will produce a NODATA which is the lesser seen case, their will be inconsistency though out the mail infrastructure where NULL MX is not understood. 3) A very large number of domains already advertise that they do not send email by using SPF: "v=spf1 -all". 4) A very large number of domains have misconfigured MX records with IP addresses as the target. Perhaps the null MX is better off redefining a condition that is currently considered a misconfiguration. 5) Why not "example.org. IN MX 0 _i_send_no_email.example.org."? This avoids any requery to anything but the local resolvers and example.org.

Personally, I much prefer something like CSV or SPF where there are no consequences if concept is unknown to receiver.

On Apr 7, 2005, at 5:32 AM, Tony Finch wrote:

When I did testing with . targets on SRV records, it appeared to me that BIND was deliberately returning NODATA instead of the negative SRV record.
Did I interpret its behaviour correctly?

Well, there is no SRV record at the root but the root does exist, so NODATA seems to be the right answer.


Again... no morning coffee.  Everything in this email could be rubbish!

-andy


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