John Jetmore wrote:
> On Mon, 6 Nov 2006, Wakko Warner wrote:
> 
> > mind.  If the HELO is different, why not verify it?  If you have a host that
> > is legit doing this, the A record of the HELO should match the IP and you
> > could allow that to pass.  Most of the HELOs that I have seen are more of
> 
> I've been trying to ignore this thread but this is just such a bad idea 
> and depends on invalid assumptions.  I have what I believe to be a fairly 
> common mail setup that is perfectly legal but causes a single IP to source 
> multiple IPs.  I have a pool of servers that are used by our billing 
> system.  They are behind a firewall PAT address, so on the public internet 
> the PAT address appears to be sending SMTP connections with different HELO 
> strings.
> 
> These servers have valid MX records in DNS.  These MX records have 
> _nothing_ to do with the PAT address.  They do _not_ have public A 
> records because there is no need for them.

I said absolutely nothing about MX records.  I said "A" records.

> There is nothing illegal about the above configuration, everything that 
> needs to be valid is valid.  But there's nothing tying any of the HELO 
> strings to the originating PAT address that I can see.  Any scheme you 
> come up with to "validate" the HELO strings (or at least all the ones I've 
> seen so far) will fail, even though it's all kosher.

Sounds to me like you're saying that the name your servers present in HELO
do not have an A record (or that the result won't be the IP address that the
receiving server sees).  In either case, I see that as wrong anyway.  Had I
configured my server to actually do what I mentioned, I would not be
willing to accept mail from hosts that do this.  There are far too many spam
bots that are consistently giving random and non-verifiable addresses.  And
yes, I do know about the ones that do a PTR lookup on the zombie's current
IP and use that.

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