Marjorie Roome via Dng <dng@lists.dyne.org> wrote:

> I also end up rejecting a lot of spam because it lacks a reverse hostname 
> (it's easily the largest category).
> So it's not just a few such as ntlworld and gmx that check this.

IIRC the specific complaint wasn't that they checked for rDNS, but that they 
matched it against the domain of the sender. That makes no sense at all, it 
prevents running more than one domain on one mail server.

I also use lack of rDNS as a check. I also check it for obvious 
misconfigurations like (from memory) : it's an IP literal (not allowed by RFC), 
it's not one of my domains, the domain actually exists.
But one thing I don't check is that the rDNS matches the name given by the 
server in it's greeting - that just gets too many rejections because to many 
supposedly professional IT people can't get basics right. And I don't just mean 
"little guys", some of the problems I've seen with DNS and mail servers have 
been from larger outfits where I know they employ sizeable IT departments.



Rick Moen <r...@linuxmafia.com> wrote:

> :r! dig -t txt _dmarc.linuxmafia.com +short
> "DMARC: tragically misdesigned since 2012.  Check our SPF RR, instead."

Thank you for brightening my day :-)



On 26 Sep 2020, at 04:53, Mark Rousell <mark.rous...@signal100.com> wrote:

> Ah, thanks. It does make deliverability easier to send via an established 
> SMTP server such an one's ISP's server.

But then you :

a) lose all visibility of what happens to your mail
One of the reasons I use my own mail server is because I can then see exactly 
what's happening to my mail. Especially if it's not getting delivered - which 
these days doesn't generally seem to be a problem, even for AOL !
It also means I have evidence from my logs. On a number of occasions I've used 
this along the lines of "as per <blah, blah> which was delivered to your 
mailserver on <timestamp>" when dealing with people who have "conveniently 
lost" previous communications.

b) are reliant on your ISP being capable of running a mail server reliably.
I don't think I'm alone in finding ISP mail server offerings to "have 
shortcomings". I've personally lost mail due to incompetent ISPs.
As previously mentioned, unless you are expecting an email that doesn't arrive, 
you don't know you've lost it. I went through a phase where my ISP was losing 
mail, but only intermittently. It was only when I could pinpoint something 
missing, and the sender was tech savvy enough to be able to give me their 
server logs, did my ISP finally consider I had a complaint to investigate - 
they then went and changed my settings in their control panel to wrong 
settings, and lost mail that they'd had queued on the wrong server for some 
time (triggered delivery without any notice, but from the wrong server and my 
server rejected them as it only allowed mail specific servers (the ones they 
listed as inbound relays)).


But then, having run mail servers for some years now, I can really really 
understand the desire to make it an SEP (Someone Else's Problem) !


Simon

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