Hello, On Saturday, November 16, 2002, at 04:12 AM, Bill Cole wrote:At 9:20 AM -0800 11/15/02, Roger Corbin imposed structure on a stream of electrons, yielding:
[snip]
That is definitely odd.
It looks like the folks running that mail server have something in particular against you. Your mail server's address does not seem to be in any blacklist used by the sane, just in XBL for being downstream of Telus.
I wonder if it might not be because the reverse DNS for your mail server'
s IP address is bad? It seems to be returning a CNAME instead of a PTR, and the name in that CNAME does not resolve. That is wrong 2 ways. It should yield a PTR record pointing at a name that resolves, preferably back to the same IP.
What is the proper way to check that your server has a proper ptr record?
Well, my favorite is a Unix tool called 'dig' that exists in OS X. The simple way is to use the -x flag to tell it that you want a reverse-DNS lookup:
toaster% dig -x 208.146.241.24
; <<>> DiG 8.3 <<>> -x
;; res options: init recurs defnam dnsrch
;; got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 4
;; flags: qr aa rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 4, ADDITIONAL: 4
;; QUERY SECTION:
;; 24.241.146.208.in-addr.arpa, type = ANY, class = IN
;; ANSWER SECTION:
24.241.146.208.in-addr.arpa. 1D IN PTR mail.colony.net.
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
241.146.208.in-addr.arpa. 1D IN NS jer.mia.net.
241.146.208.in-addr.arpa. 1D IN NS ns.mia.net.
241.146.208.in-addr.arpa. 1D IN NS ns1.mia.net.
241.146.208.in-addr.arpa. 1D IN NS ns2.mia.net.
;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
jer.mia.net. 1D IN A 208.146.240.10
ns.mia.net. 1D IN A 208.146.240.194
ns1.mia.net. 1D IN A 66.101.112.10
ns2.mia.net. 1D IN A 208.146.242.10
;; Total query time: 5280 msec
;; FROM: toaster to SERVER: default -- 192.168.254.8
;; WHEN: Sat Nov 16 16:48:29 2002
;; MSG SIZE sent: 45 rcvd: 213
Looks good to me.
In my never-humble opinion, mail servers that make such checks of DNS are going overboard. Having rDNS is not a technical requirement of mail: not having it might cause some other MTA's to shun you, but aside from that it is not really related to functionality of any sort. Not having simply circular reverse and forward records (as some even more picky systems demand) is actually a rational choice for some networks, and it is absurd to require it.I want to make sure that my server is setup as properly as possible.
However, if you are really interested in having your mail work reliably, having no reverse DNS or reverse DNS which is unequivocally wrong (like a CNAME where a PTR should be, and that CNAME pointing to a non-resolving name) is unwise. It is smart (if you don't have a complex situation which prevents it) to make the records cleanly circular so that the name you HELO as (i.e. the name that SIMS sets in the general settings) has an A record pointing to the address you connect through, which has a PTR record pointing back to that name. That way even the most obsessive peers will not have any excuse to look down on the naming scheme you use.
--
Bill Cole [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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