Re: The anti-abuse rDNS check that FTP gave up

Keith Moore wrote:

> > Right, but this mechanism is not stupid, instead it is clever ;-)
> nope.  it makes no sense whatsoever.  it is using a completely 
> irrelevant test to decide whether mail is legitimate.  and it's 
> easily defeated by spammers.  it's not only a complete waste of time, 
> it's worse in that it causes legitimate mail to be dropped.
or at least initially cause transactions to be rejected at specifics 
receivers doing IP PTR checking.
> rejecting mail for this reason should be a criminal offense.
IMO, if the ISP is providing the name servers for a business tier 
account and they fail to add ARPA records for the IPs, I would 
consider this MAL-PRACTICE today - certainly tortious interference.
I think Otis can fill us in more (MAPS), but as I recall, ISP's did 
add ARPA records or they had provisioned it (outsourced) it or rather 
it wasn't an issue because AOL.COM did not start to do this yet.
But that stopped around 2000-2003 when MAPs which no longer servicing 
ISPs or the ISP decided to save money.   But as the customer support 
issue increased, they realized they needed to do add the ARPA records 
because others were beginning to follow AOL.COM who started this crap.
I agree with you Keith - there is no logic to it, at least I don't 
see, it's moronic and I recall my brother's business getting hurt by 
it when he moved his business to a different provider and they put his 
business tier account on the same trunk as Home based tiers - so he 
didn't get the BIZ privileges he expected.
He got that resolved, but today, if you want to setup an MTA to send 
out mail, you have no choice but to make sure the machine IP has an 
PTR record.
In other words, like it or not, stupid, moronic or not, forget Mom and 
Pop shops, if you want to send to email to aol.com accounts, you need 
a PTR record when connecting to them.
C'est la vie.

---