I am getting a real education today, thanks to everyone for responding. I was thinking that the verify return paths was doing a reverse lookup on the sender's IP, when in fact it was looking at the sender's from address "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" and having a problem with that because 1) DNS was not working at all on the machine at the time, and 2) I had the domain in General Settings set to "mail.optionsbydesign.com" rather than "optionsbydesign.com", so that must have forced a lookup, which was failing.
This means that I can now re-enable the Verify Return paths function. Again, thanks to all for the input. > On Wednesday, March 12, 2003, at 02:44 PM, Gil Poulsen wrote: > >> I do find it strange, though, that SIMS would verify return paths for >> local >> users. How could they possibly resolve correctly if local users have >> non-routable, DHCP-assigned IPs like 192.168.0.6 or 10.0.1.6? Or am I >> not >> understanding what this function is actually doing? > > Verify return paths is based on the Return Path header, which is a > user's email address. It is passed to the mail server as part of the > "MAIL FROM: [EMAIL PROTECTED]" command. SIMS does a lookup on domain.com, > not a reverse lookup on the sending IP address. Since domain.com, in > the case of local users, is typically the mail server itself, it > doesn't have to go actually do a DNS check, since it's locally valid. > > Verify return paths is a sanity check more than a security procedure. > It will keep spammers from using addresses like > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> and <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. -- Gil Poulsen, Mac Wirehead ************************ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Consulting 23 Marco Polo Court Franklin Park, NJ 08823-1703 Voice: 732-940-1673 FAX: 732-940-1674 http://altimac.com ************************ ############################################################# This message is sent to you because you are subscribed to the mailing list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. To unsubscribe, E-mail to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To switch to the DIGEST mode, E-mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To switch to the INDEX mode, E-mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Send administrative queries to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
