🚀 go-pugleaf

On Tuesday, in article <885315010snz@wash.demon.co.uk>
     john$@wash.demon.co.uk "John Washington" wrote:

JW> On Sunday, in article <885188192snx@llondel.demon.co.uk>
JW>      noone@llondel.demon.co.uk "Dave {Reply address in.sig}"
JW>      wrote:
JW> 
JW> Di> A better bet would be to put in some fancy DNS-lookup stuff, which 
JW> Di> would get rid of a large amount of junk. Anything without at least an MX 
JW> Di> record on its source address can them be rejected. Should encourage 
JW> Di> people to email you with valid addresses and not with a NOSPAM stuck in 
JW> Di> the middle of their hostname as well :-)
JW> 
JW> Are MX records reasonably reliably available?  I like the sound
JW> of this method, but not if it means I risk bouncing valid mail
JW> from remote but valid corners of the world.

I would be wary of it, especuially given the generally flaky
state of Demon's DNS caches of late.

I run a few mailing lists via a server in Australia (cos it's
a friend's server, and she'll happily host the lists I want).

Most of the recipients are in the UK, and receive mail with no
problem, but ...  one the .ac.uk sites has now started using
just this sort of MX lookup as an anti-spam jobby.  Problem is,
their link is slow and congested, and JANET's intl connectivity
can be pretty saturated, so the lookup often times out --
so the mail is bounced :(

We got round this by routeing the mail through another friendly
node in Canada, but it has taught me that if you are going to
*reliably* use a DNS-based verification method, you'd better
be prepared to set *very* long timeouts.  No prob with a leased
line, but expensive on a dial-up.   So unless you own a telco
I'd scrub the idea :(

As an aside, and in case you're wondering why this .ac.uk site
has a bad set-up, the story (as I have been told it) is sad --
almost worthy of comp.risks.  Like all universities these days,
they are short of cash, so pay their staff in fragments of
peanuts.  Still, they had some good ppl.  But then some wise
bureaucrat decided to split the growing computer services dept
into academic computing and administrative computing: sound
enough, except that the techies then wisely reasoned that since
the admin ppl are good at keeping the $$$s for themselves,
they'd join the admin team if possible, and structured things so
that most them went there -- including all the good ppl.  And one
or two goofs are left to cope with all the demands of the
academic staff, most of whom seem to just want their email to
work.  Which it doesn't ... 

Claire

(anti-spam address in use -- you can reply directly for the
next few weeks, but thereafter pls change username to "c-mac")


-- 
Anti-spam address in use.  The address given will be valid
for a few weeks; thereafter, change the username to "c-mac"
when replying