Re: [Asrg] What are the IPs that sends mail for a domain?

John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> Mon, 22 June 2009 12:51 UTC

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Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2009 12:51:24 -0000
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From: John Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
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Subject: Re: [Asrg] What are the IPs that sends mail for a domain?
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In article <4A3F76B8.2030409@terabites.com> you write:
>And the circle goes round and round.

My, we have a lot of dead horses here.

>The first one has been pointed out, but perhaps not strongly enough.  IT IS 
>STUPID AND COUNTERPRODUCTIVE TO BOUNCE NOTICE OF NON-DELIVERY TO RECOGNIZED SPAM 

Yes, we know.  It's been best practice for years to reject mail you're not
planning to deliver, not bounce it.  There are, of course, a lot of dusty
MTAs still doing worst practices, but our ability to fix them is limited.

>Also let me reiterate (as was pointed out) that sending inquiry
>messages to try to authenticate a valid mail agent LIKEWISE
>multiplies the bandwidth already wasted by the original spam.

Callbacks are widely discredited other than among a few small
filtering vendors who think they're the secret sauce to keep the users
paying.  I routinely block all connections from hosts where I see C/R
callbacks, and I doubt I'm the only one.

>connection during a sales call visit on-site to his customer, and where that 
>host's corporate network policy blocks sending of port 25 messages other than 
>to/through that company's own outgoing SMTP server. 

It's been best practice for a decade to use SUBMIT or a tunnel back to
your own host to send mail.  These days it's just laziness to do
anything else.  As someone else asked a few minutes ago, are there any
significant mail systems that still don't provide SUBMIT?

>E-mail coming from unfamiliar correspondents can be held to a (even much) 
>higher-than-usual standard regarding the ground rules for what is
>acceptable and what is not.

Yes, that's why we've been working on mail authentication a la DKIM for
several years, to allow us to recognize known senders reliably.

R's,
John