Date: Fri, 09 Jan 2026 13:34:42 -0500
From: Paul Fox <[email protected]>
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
| I'm surprised at this, since to my knowledge neither my wife nor I
| have ever had trouble sending to a gmail recipient.
It depends what hoops your MTA admin is willing to jump through to
keep up with their nonsense rules. I'm not willing to adjust my
system for any of them. I have no SPF records (though I do have
a couple of TXT records, from before SPF became a thing, which look
a bit like SPF records) and I don't do DKIM (or anything similar).
One of the issues they dislike is that munnari.oz.au mostly sends
using IPv6 when it can, but its v6 addr has no IP6.ARPA entry.
I consider those entries (v4 as well, but it happens that munnari
has an IN-ADDR.ARPA entry from the distant past) a waste of time,
as in the vast majority of cases these days all that is ever
reported is stuff like a.b.c.d.random.ISP.COM (for IPv4, and similar,
but longer, for IPv6) where the IP address is either a.b.c.d or d.c.b.a.
Since the IP addr was already known (the key for the lookup) this
doesn't tell anyone anything useful at all, so it is a waste of time
looking it up. If searching for it is useless, then providing some
other info must be similarly useless. Requiring it "to stop spam"
is obvious nonsense, actually registering something which works is
trivial (just wasteful for everyone), so any spammer aware that check
is made will certainly do that. In effect, mail these days is less
likely to be spam if there's no reverse lookup available (but, of course,
only because that is one of the tests used, which is something of a
catch-22).
| Do the gmail issues that you and others have had
| result in a bounce, or a drop?
>From gmail a bounce, though whether the bounce contains the
original message or not, I have no idea, I filter bounce messages
info a junkmail/bounces folder, and never bother looking there.
>From outlook a bounce as well, from my local MTA, after it eventually
gives up attempting to send the message (that one includes no useful
information other than that the recipient's system couldn't be
contacted.)
And in case it wasn't clear, which it almost certainly wasn't,
the messages I am referring to are all ones from munnari.oz.au
direct to gmail or outlook(etc). (Those are the only two receiving MTAs
I have issues with). Messages that go from me via a list (like
this one) can (sometimes) reach recipients with gmail or outlook
mailboxes.
kre
ps: we could discuss this forever, but it all has nothing to do with nmh
