Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

AT&T Moves Toward Mail-Server Whitelist

Posted by timothy on from the is-it-better-than-spam dept.

Gunfighter writes "In an apparent attempt to quelch the amount of incoming spam, AT&T has asked their customers, partners, and business clients to provide them with IP addresses of their mail servers. All other mail will be discarded. To quote the message: "... In order to continue to allow email to AT&T you need to provide the IP addresses of all your outbound email gateways. If you do not respond immediately, your access may not continue.""

3 of 447 comments (clear)

  1. RTFA? by fo0bar · · Score: 5, Informative

    FYI, this seems to be from AT&T Business Services, IE backbone and ip operations. So their customers (the people they are asking) in this case are other ISPs, datacenters, etc, and the whitelist is for sending email to AT&T itself. This has nothing to do with other AT&T services (remember, "AT&T" is essentially about a hundred different companies that happen to share the same name), so this should not affect some grandma trying to send to an attbi account. That being said, whether what they're doing is good remains to be seen.

    (Interestingly enough, I *DO* work for a datacenter that has IP and transit services through AT&T, and have not received one of these emails yet...)

  2. Just because... by sillypixie · · Score: 4, Informative
    you whitelist some servers does not have to mean that you have to blacklist all the others. If AT&T really means to do this, they will learn the hard way when their business suffers.

    There are several initiatives underway to use DNS to authenticate SMTP transactions: this seems like a good way to avoid the nastiness described by the parent poster...

    The article really does sound like this request is an emergency response to a specific threat - The intent seems to me to be more of a temporary bandaid solution than an attempt to alter the very fabric of email as we know it (-:

    Pixie

    --
    don't mess with those geekgrrls
  3. Re:All it takes by bobv-pillars-net · · Score: 3, Informative

    dig mx att.com

    then telnet to port 25 for each MX host

    I get no response from any of them.

    Keep trying. According to my logs, about 30% of the time, they DO respond. I don't know if they're overloaded 70% of the time or if their IP-filter breaks 30% of the time, but if you keep trying long enough, you will get through.

    --
    The Web is like Usenet, but
    the elephants are untrained.