[TAG] (forw) Spam Prevention by Enforcing Standards

[Rick Moen]

Recently received Chez Moen, and I replied back saying it's indeed an
astute and elegant idea, which I might very well adopt for my own
domains.  (In the absence of an MX = mail exchanger record in the DNS
for a mail-receiving machine on the Internet, RFC 2821 specifies that
the sending host should fallback on the "A" = forward lookup record,
instead.  This was also true with the original SMTP-defining RFC, RFC
821.)

And, in case anyone is wondering, Gokhan Gucukoglu's name is Turkish.
He seems to be based in the UK, and is one of those protean characters
active broadly across free / open source software, just to make the
rest of us look bad by comparison.  ;->

----- Forwarded message from Sabahattin Gucukoglu <mail at sabahattin-gucukoglu.com> -----

Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 09:48:55 +0100
From: Sabahattin Gucukoglu <mail at sabahattin-gucukoglu.com>
To: TAG <tag at lists.linuxgazette.net>
To: rick at linuxmafia.com
Subject: Spam Prevention by Enforcing Standards

Hi,

I notice that linuxmafia.com has just one MX, linuxmafia.com.  See RFC 2821 
section 5: remove your MX record; there is an implicit MX rule.  Good MTAs 
know it, most spammers, their spamware, their agents, etc, etc, still 
don't.  It's a great little trick and is doing me bloody wonders.  (It may 
on very, very rare occasions break mailers which *insist* that there be an 
MX record when you issue MAIL FROM linuxmafia.com; such mailers are broken 
and you really don't want to talk to them anyway :-) .)

(If you wonder why I noticed at all, it's your multiline greeting.)

Cheers,
Sabahattin

-- 
Sabahattin Gucukoglu <mail<at>sabahattin<dash>gucukoglu<dot>com>
Address harvesters, snag this: feedme at yamta.org
Phone: +44 20 88008915
Mobile: +44 7986 053399
http://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/

----- End forwarded message -----