smtp-refuser hassles
It looks as if this guy at Yahoo has put a lot of work into tracking this
down.
Bruce
To: Bruce Perens <bruce@hams.com>
Subject: smtp-refuser support issues
Date: Fri, 05 Mar 1999 11:15:50 -0800
From: John Hanley <jh@yahoo-inc.com>
X-UIDL: 4a801d03d1138ad3140babd0c89e8746
Status: R
Hullo. Here is the problem we discussed.
206.248.0.0/255.252.0.0 is a range of IP addresses used by folks other
than AGIS. Besides, companies change policies and IP addresses change owners.
So there should be some means of updating blackhole lists if people are going
to install smtp-refuser and then blindly use the list without verifying it.
RBL does updates in realtime, but daily or even weekly ftp mirroring would be
better than having the prefix burned into distributions until the end of time.
I postmaster mail-relay2.yahoo.com [206.251.17.77], which sends out replies
to folks who requested help from <someone@yahoo-inc.com>. From time to time
this host makes a port 25 connection and then sees it drop with no SMTP banner.
Could be a core dump on the far end, or lots of other things, but in the
case of sending to idsi.net I finally diagnosed it as smtp-refuser syslog'ing
a reject and then sendmail drops out with no SMTP banner sent. It took weeks
and many phone calls; I am currently working on several other sites which have
similar symptoms.
Please issue an update which (at least) doesn't blacklist 206.251.0.0/19,
which notes the support issues surrounding online updates of blacklists,
and perhaps defaults to being pretty permissive until the installer
manually uncomments some configuration lines.
Thank you kindly for your anti-spam efforts in the past and for
your pro-email efforts in the future.
Cheers,
JH +1 408 731 3395 Network Operations
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