Fight Spam With Nolisting

An anonymous reader writes with the technique of Nolisting, which fights spam by specifying a primary MX that is always unavailable. The page is an extensive FAQ and how-to guide that addressed the objections I immediately came up with. From the article: "It has been observed that when a domain has both a primary (high priority, low number) and a secondary (low priority, high number) MX record configured in DNS, overall SMTP connections will decrease when the primary MX is unavailable. This decrease is unexpected because RFC 2821 (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) specifies that a client MUST try and retry each MX address in order, and SHOULD try at least two addresses. It turns out that nearly all violators of this specification exist for the purpose of sending spam or viruses. Nolisting takes advantage of this behavior by configuring a domain's primary MX record to use an IP address that does not have an active service listening on SMTP port 25. RFC-compliant clients will retry delivery to the secondary MX, which is configured to serve the role normally performed by the primary MX)."

Comments

Re:That's "greylisting".

[Anonymous Coward]

Just an aside on greylisting: I run a large mail server and we WERE using greylisting. However we have found that many firewalls and anti-spam appliances that act as email proxies cannot respond to the 451 or 421 "try again" response used by greylisting. The appliances bounce the message back to the sender reporting it as a server failure. Unfortunately, this user group includes an ever growing number of goverment agencies and public schools. My best guess is that these appliances have no way to store the message should the first attempt at delivery fail.

I sincerely doubt that most of them would ever try more than the primary MX when delivering mail either.

Non-complience with the standards by email handling programs just makes it easier for the spammers by taking away a postmasters anti-spam tools :-(