DON'T use DNS BLs, they appear to be dying fast...

DON'T use DNS BLs, they appear to be dying fast...

[Matti Aarnio]

Or rather..   lattest thing to raise its ugly head is
    dorkslayers.com
which in itself, and in all its subdomains ("*.dorkslayers.com")
points to Verisign's web service.    (Properly functioning lookup
routines would ignore A-records with wrong kind values, and lacking
TXT entries, but obviously I see cases where still present lookups
do use faulty premisses.)

None of the "free service" DNS BLs appear to have very long life-times.
The technology has some usefull ideas behind it, but alas once some
free service becomes popular, it is prone to overload, receive litigation
threats ("wonderfull" usa..) and fold over.  Often the folding is
accompanied with a period of poisoned datasets.

/Matti Aarnio -- co-postmaster of vger.kernel.org

Re: DON'T use DNS BLs, they appear to be dying fast...

[Rik van Riel]

On Tue, 16 Sep 2003, Matti Aarnio wrote:

> Or rather..   lattest thing to raise its ugly head is
>     dorkslayers.com
> which in itself, and in all its subdomains ("*.dorkslayers.com")
> points to Verisign's web service.

Well yeah, dorkslayers seems to have been down for over a
year now, the domain expiring etc...

Still, I don't think it's fair of you to blame the DNSBL
operators for the fact that some mail admins only check
their MTA configuration once every 2 years.

There have been cases where a DNSBL still got 1Mbit/s in
DNS queries 6 months after the database went dead...

-- 
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan