I would LOVE to see AOL start blocking on RDNS! If they do it, then we can
start doing it. Then within a few months, all of the legitimate mail servers
on the planet will have proper RDNS and the Spammers will have a much harder
time with life. Spam will decline a LOT!!!
"A lot," I'm not convinced. While it would become more reliable than it is now, it wouldn't likely become more than 90% accurate for years to come and by then there would be a widely supported method of verifying the sender's domain.
Remember, the SBL type of spammer typically has reverse DNS lookups for all of the IP's that they send E-mail from, and the crud type of spammer typically use zombied machines that are virus infected and mostly sit on residential broadband connections with reverse DNS lookups. Such a test would do nothing for this type of thing. What this would mostly affect is E-mail scripts configured from Web sites that don't have reverse DNS lookups. Some of that is spam, but there's a good deal of it created by legit sources who also generally lack the understanding or capabilities to detect issues with their reverse DNS lookups and spam blocking.
The Internet is anarchy, and you can't expect that the community as a whole will produce a much better result than it does currently. It's up to the responsible administrators who have the understanding, the time and the tools to protect their users from spam at the receiving end, not the other way around. You need look no further than the continued spread viruses for proof of concept, which continues in greater and greater numbers despite attempts by Microsoft to automate updates, user education, and the wide distribution of anti-virus products at reasonable prices.
Blocking servers without reverse DNS lookups will only result in spammers avoiding such sources, or taking extra care to make sure they exist, it will not stop any serious spammer from doing their so-called job, and as far as I can tell, it only makes ours harder as a result. Look no further than AOL's recent activity for proof of that.
Matt
--- [This E-mail was scanned for viruses by Declude Virus (http://www.declude.com)]
--- This E-mail came from the Declude.JunkMail mailing list. To unsubscribe, just send an E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], and type "unsubscribe Declude.JunkMail". The archives can be found at http://www.mail-archive.com.
