North American Network Operators Group

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Re: SORBS Contact

  • From: Matthew Sullivan
  • Date: Thu Aug 10 00:54:49 2006


Allan Poindexter wrote:
  Matthew> so would you consider as it is my network, that I should
  Matthew> not be allowed to impose these 'draconian' methods and
  Matthew> perhaps I shouldn't be allowed to censor traffic to and
  Matthew> from my networks?

If you want to run a network off in the corner by yourself this is
fine. If you have agreed to participate in the Internet you have an
obligation to deliver your traffic.
That's a very "interesting" statement. Here's my response, I'll deliver your traffic if it is not abusive if you delivery my non-abusive traffic. My definition of 'abusive' is applied to what I will let cross my border (either direction) - I expect you will want to do the same with the traffic you define as abusive, and I expect you to and support your right to do that.
There are simple solutions to this. They do work in spite of the
moanings of the hand wringers. In the meantime my patience with email
"lost" silently due to blacklists, etc. is growing thin.
Anyone using SORBS as I have intended and provided (and documented) will/should not silently discard mail.

If anyone asks how to silently discard mail I actively and vigorously discourage the practice.* In fact because I disagree with that even in the case of virus infected mail I patches my postfix servers to virus scan inline so virus infected mail can be rejected at the SMTP transaction. RFC2821 is clear when you have issued an ok response to the endofdata command you accept responsibility for the delivery of that message and that should not fail or be lost through trivial or avoidable reasons - I consider virus detection and spam as trivial reasons - if you can't detect a reason for rejection at the SMTP transaction, deliver the mail.

Regards,

Mat


* except in extreme/unusual circumstances - for example, there are 2 email addresses that if they send mail *to* me, they will get routed to /dev/null regardless of content.