nslookup from WinNT machine

[Joseph S D Yao]

On Tue, May 29, 2001 at 09:00:01PM -0400, Kevin Darcy wrote:

a very good point - some sites prefer to maximize the amount of mail
that correctly gets through, at the expense of some spam; others prefer
to maximize the spam exclusion, at the expense of some real mail
falling through the cracks.  This is much like some sites refusing all
mail from freemail sites, a practice that horrifies others.  Each site
must choose its own policy.

HOWEVER,

In the same message, he suggests that spammers will soon learn how to
make PTR records.  This directly contradicts his earlier good point
that it is so hard to understand how to make PTR records that many
system administrators [who are on the whole much more intelligent than
spammers - jsdy] just neglect to do so.  Further, it does ABSOLUTELY NO
GOOD to make your own PTR records.  You would have to force the owner
of the parent zone to delegate to you - which so far is hard enough to
do even if you are the correct delegatee!  ;-)

Our biggest uses of PTR records is to track down internal problems [and
problem users], and to notify external sites when problems start
happening which appear to be coming from their sites.  If you ever want
me to be able to trace a site of yours that has been hacked by someone
else, and to be able to notify you, I would continue to keep your PTR
records current.  ;-)  Especially since 'whois' on IP addresses doesn't
seem to be being kept up very well.

-- 
Joe Yao				jsdy at cospo.osis.gov - Joseph S. D. Yao
OSIS Center Computer Support					EMT-B
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