Christopher X. Candreva writes on 12/3/2003 10:13 AM:
Since I'm 99% sure the idea (or stupidity thereof :-) of blocking SMTP servers without reverse DNS came up here in this discussion, I just ran a manual queue run to clean out a queue, and saw this come up:
They have had this policy since several months now but it is still a "may" - and does give them a good excuse to take out large IP blocks that don't have proper reverse DNS assigned and emit a lot of spam. More at http://postmaster.info.aol.com If this is what it takes to push more people to get valid PTR records on their mailservers ...
I don't know if this is new -- I don't recall seeing it before, but it doesn't say they WILL refuse, just they may. If they do start blocking -- this WILL be an operational issue.
Lots of mailservers (such as the one for freebsd.org) already do this. I have not seen any large ISP other than AOL do this yet, though. However if they make it a "must" rather than a "may", I can see a whole lot of ISPs who will be quite eager to follow suit and do something on the same lines. srs -- srs (postmaster|suresh)@outblaze.com // gpg : EDEDEFB9 manager, outblaze.com security and antispam operations