[dns-operations] OT: NXDOMAIN / public resolvers and zen.spamhaus.org

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 01:03:49AM -0700,
 Rod Rasmussen <rod.rasmussen at internetidentity.com> wrote 
 a message of 38 lines which said:

> Actually I think the issue is that Spamhaus purposely does not
> provide resolution for major public open resolvers.  I can double
> check with them, but I believe they don't want people (i.e. bad
> guys) using those resolvers to walk their entire block list, and of
> course, they have a business model to support, and for major e-mail
> handlers, they have a fee structure.  If you're using a resolver
> like Google's, then they can't tell who's really hitting their
> servers for RBL requests and why.

That's a sensible explanation but, in that case, SpamHaus is quite
dishonest to say in their documentation
<http://www.spamhaus.org/faq/answers.lasso?section=DNSBL%20Usage#261> that it's the fault of the public DNS resolver.