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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: [policy] When Tech Meets Policy...
On Wed, 2007-08-15 at 11:58 +1000, Mark Andrews wrote: > > Accepting messages from a domain lacking MX records might be risky > > due to the high rate of domain turnovers. Within a few weeks, > > more than the number of existing domains will have been added and > > deleted by then. Spammers take advantage of this flux. SMTP > > server discovery via A records is permitted and should be > > deprecated. > > All it would require is a couple of large ISP's to adopt > such a policy. "MX 0 <self>" really is not hard and benefits > the remote caches. Agreed. While some suggest deprecating A record discovery requires adoption by a standards body, it really only requires a few ISPs to make their intentions public. A small minority of domains lacking an MX record are likely to comply quickly. At that point, adoption by a standards body becomes possible. It is rare to find a standards body willing impose additional requirements on email, but this is a case where such a requirement is clearly necessary. That point forward, spammers would be less able to take advantage of domains in flux, and policy schemes would be far less perilous for roots or second level domains. > > Once MX records are adopted as an _acceptance_ > > requisite, domains not intended to receive or send email would be > > clearly denoted by the absence of MX records. SMTP policy > > published adjacent to MX records also eliminates a need for email > > policy "discovery" as well. Another looming problem. > > Better yet use MX records to signal that you don't want to > receive email e.g. "MX 0 .". It has a additional benefits > in that it is *much* smaller to cache than a negative > response. It's also smaller to cache than a A record. > > Since all valid email domains are required to have a working > postmaster you can safely drop any email from such domains. Use of root "." as a name for a target may create undesired non-cached traffic when applications unaware of this convention then attempt to resolve an address for servers named root. The use of root as a convention will complicate a general strategy identifying adoption of a protocol by publication of a discovery record. The use of root as a target name in SRV records has been problematic, although this convention was defined for SRV records at the outset. Using an MX record to mean "no email is accepted" by naming the target 'root' changes the meaning of the MX record. It is also not clear whether the root target would mean "no email is sent" as well. A clearer and safer strategy would be to insist that anyone who cares about their email delivery, publish a valid MX record. Especially when the domain is that of a government agency dealing with emergencies. At least FEMA now publishes an MX record. This requirement should have been imposed long ago. : ) -Doug
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