As impled in my query, suspicion the toolset used is not legitimate for today's use. I think you have further confirmed. The additional ideas are appreciated
From: community@mailsbestfriend.com [mailto:community@mailsbestfriend.com] On Behalf Of Andy Schmidt Sent: Monday, November 21, 2016 6:46 PM To: community@mailsbestfriend.com Subject: [MBF] Re: Abuse & Postmaster Hi Martin, There is no way at all for any external party (a black list, DNSSTUFF or a recipient SMTP server) to determine whether inside your Imail or SmarterMail configuration you defined a particular email address (such as Postmaster@..., Abuse@... or Root@...) as a separate mailbox or as a forwarding alias. All that's visible to the outside is whether your server accepts an email address as valid - or not. So - a few things are possible: a) A bug in the testing tool you are using, or b) Your mail server having rejected an email from the testing tools SMTP relay because it fails some OTHER rule, or c) Your mail server's IP address currently being listed in one of the "non-compliant servers" black list, and your testing tool is reporting THAT. Outside of those most likely scenarios, there are also some servers that don't care much about the "abuse" contact for your DOMAIN name, because the assumption is that spammers will register new (or hack reputable) domain names all the time. Instead, they use the "WHOIS" information of your provider's IP block to ee if IT contains an abuse contact - since that would be a much more likely "legitimate" abuse contact. The problem comes in with SWIPing. When providers have various WHOIS entries for countless delegated segments of their huge IP blocks, they don't always bother to populate all those fields down the stream. While a human would have the sense to follow the chain up to the ultimate parent organization and readily find their official abuse contacts - it's not unusual for attempted spam filters to fail miserably and consider the individual IP block as missing an abuse contact. Best Regards Andy Schmidt logo-rgb-178.png 600 East Crescent Avenue, Suite 203 Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458-1846 Phone: +1 201 934-3414 x20 (Business) Fax: +1 201 934-9206 <http://www.hm-software.com/> http://www.HM-Software.com/ Von: community@mailsbestfriend.com [mailto:community@mailsbestfriend.com] Im Auftrag von Martin Margheim Gesendet: Montag, 21. November 2016 15:11 An: community@mailsbestfriend.com Betreff: [MBF] Abuse & Postmaster I have been working with the premise that postmaster and abuse email accounts could be operated as alias email addresses. However, for whatever reason, a check this morning using DNSTUFF's Professional Toolset results in reporting no abuse or postmaster email exists. Perhaps this is result of how the toolset checks for email addresses. Afterall, it is a rather dated toolset and perhaps never been updated, particularly since acquired by SolarWinds no longer a subscription DNS Tool. Thoughts? Martin
