Tony Finch writes:
On Thu, 29 Mar 2007, Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote:
Well... I ran a little xargs dig | sort | grep I wc loop now, and
see a depressingly large number of TLDs now have MX records. The
first time I counted that was in the early nineties: 1 TLD MX. Then
second was IIRC around the time 2821 was published: 0. And the
third today: 25.
There are also several TLDs with A records - only a couple have both.
None have AAAA records :-)
What does this mean? I'm not sure. I think I'd like to hear what
some of the people operating those MXes thing. Shall I spam
postmaster@ those and ask?
You'll be disappointed :-)
On the contrary.
I've done some non-intrusive probes (MAIL/RCPT/RSET) to see what I can
find. Most of them are horribly misconfigured - the MTAs don't think
the domain is local or aren't listening. Only five seem to work (ai,
io, tk, tt*, ua), in that they accept email to postmaster and not to
random addresses. Three of these are set up with the zone admin's
first name as a valid local part. Five accept anything (as, bj*, hr,
mh*, va*). The four I have marked with * have broken secondary MXs.
I read this as saying "2821 is okay - the extra permissiveness of 821 is
worthless in practice". Fine with me.
The reason I am not disappointed: Since there are no AAAA records, the
set of IPv6-using TLD operators and that of horribly clueless TLD
operators may just possibly be disjoint.
(For your next exercise, find out how many of those 25/26 TLD operators
have blogs.)
Arnt