[dns-operations] History Question - Who first created/used DNS RBL?

[Michael Monnerie]

On Freitag, 1. Februar 2008 Paul Vixie wrote:
> > By all those old, unmanaged mailservers, as well as newer ones who
> > just copy old configs all the time. I guess the only possibilty to
> > make them stop is to always give the answer "block this host",
> > because they won't accept e-mails anymore and someone will have a
> > look - maybe ;-)
>
> "first, do no harm."

What is the bigger problem? Unmaintained mailservers, or providing wrong 
data to them? I don't believe your RBL delivers actual, full maintained 
data, so wouldn't it be better to inform users that the list should be 
taken offline? Quite surely, some of those users are open relays or 
whatever which got hacked long ago, without anybody recognising it. 
I've seen such systems, there are a lot of those here in Austria. I'd 
prefer they all got shut down instead of spamming others.

Many admins won't even know that list got offline, they just keep 
copying configs. So returning REJECT for every IP would give them a 
hint that something is wrong, and they'd look into the server and maybe 
fix other problems too. There are some small disadvantages, but nothing 
that can't be solved within some minutes.

mfg zmi
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