mouss wrote:
ajx wrote:
It seems your logic is fundamentally flawed for several reasons. By
returning false positives, you're breaking mail gateways that use this
once
useful service. On the contrary, the best way would be to simply return a
DNS host not found error or a connection refused message when a client
tries
to make contact to the service... This would reduce your bandwidth and
not
confuse and frustrate any users...
It is your logic that is flawed.
Returing an error brings nothing at
all.
Which is exactly why it is better. It brings no false positives.
That's infinitely better than returning all false positives.
the error is ignored since it has no practical consequence (except
maybe in some unread log file)
Unread/unchecked only by half-assed postmasters who aren't worth their
salt, and should thus be fired.
A decent postmaster at least generates summaries of traffic (perhaps via
cron), and will note that one of their DNSBLs dropped from "lots of hits
per day" to "no hits per day", wonders why, and looks into the problem.
These responsible postmasters (who may have missed any notification of
the impending death of the DNSBL they use) do not deserve to have the
headaches caused by generating "all false positives". They will get
angry calls from users whose mail was returned to the senders (many of
whom will not resend, some of whom are even so lazy as to not even read
bounce reports). In short, returning an always block result from a
deprecated DNSBL effectively, and inappropriately, penalizes the
responsible postmasters who do in fact check the results, and
investigate why things changed.
A postmaster who doesn't check their logs in any fashion deserves
whatever they get. Including having all of the spam sail through
unchecked. Or having their domain actually RBL'ed (ie. routed to null)
because they've continued to do queries well past any reasonable
expiration period.
Generate all misses: doesn't penalize the good postmasters, don't care
about the effect on the bad postmasters.
Generate all hits: penalizes the good postmasters, don't care about the
effect on the bad postmasters.
Clearly, only half-baked providers do the latter.
