[119586] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: AT&T SMTP Admin contact?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu)
Tue Nov 24 13:12:31 2009
To: Brad Laue <brad@brad-x.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:50:54 EST."
<4B0C0EEE.50302@brad-x.com>
From: Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 13:10:38 -0500
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
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On Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:50:54 EST, Brad Laue said:
> maintained. I'm unclear as to why mail administrators don't work more
> proactively with things like SenderID and SPF, as these seem to be far
> more maintainable in the long-run than an ever-growing list of IP
> address ranges.
There's a difference between maintainable and usable. Yes, letting the remote
end maintain their SenderID and SPF is more scalable, and both do at least a
plausible job of answering "Is this mail claiming to be from foobar.com really
from foobar.com?". However, there's like 140M+ .coms now, and neither of them
actually tell you what you really want to know, which is "do I want e-mail from
foobar.com or not?". Especially when the spammer is often in cahoots with the
DNS admins...
On the other hand, I can, by looking at my logs, develop a fairly good sense of
"do I have any real non-spam traffic from that address range?". Yes, it's more
work, but it's also more likely to actually answer the question that I wanted
answered.
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