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Re: TINW was RFC2821b is-01 Issue 1: trailing dot in Domain

2007-04-03 04:28:46

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

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