At 4:15 PM -0800 2/13/98, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
> OK, I'm quite happy that sites are tightening up on relaying. But it seems
> that some sites go a little to far. Lately I've been receiving a large
> number (well, nearly 50% by volume) of bounces from various sites telling
> me that they don't relay.
If it's intermittent, then it's because they're trying to do a DNS
lookup and it fails. Arguably, since DNS is unreliable in many parts of
the net, things should bounce as a 400 for retry instead of a 500 death
note. But folks don't do that.
The sites that do this a LOT, I've found, have real problems with DNS
and/or connectivity on THEIR end. I'm never surprised to see a few of
these with a small site like plaidworks without a lot of parallel
connectivity, but I see lots of this from my Apple site -- and if you
can't resolve my hostname out of Apple, it ain't Apple's fault...
> Now this could be because of my setup; instead of being delivered by one
> single mail server, outbound mail service is split among a number of hosts
> at my site.
As long as it's not the DNS to your site failing, or your link failing
so outside hosts trying to DNS lookup you fails intermittently, it
ain't your fault.
And we aren't even starting to talk about sites that install buggy or
bogus spamblocking. Those happen, too.
> Have other folks been seeing these kinds of errors, too? Are that many
> sites just having teething pains and screwing it up the first time? Or is
> what I'm doing really considered illegal relaying?
Oh yeah. I see it all the time. Especially overseas, where DNS is a lot
flakier. It's one reason why when I *did* install spamblocking on my
sites, I made sure it reported to me what it's doing, so if I start
seeing lots of it, I know something's bogus.
It's probably not your fault. And as more folks install spamblockers on
their sites, more of them install it badly.
--
Chuq Von Rospach (Hockey fan? <http://www.plaidworks.com/hockey/>)
Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:chuq@apple.com)
Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:chuqui@plaidworks.com)
<http://www.plaidworks.com/> + <http://www.lists.apple.com/>
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