HELP: Decomissioning a DNS anti-spam list

[Jim Reid]

>>>>> "Ronald" == Ronald F Guilmette <rfg at monkeys.com> writes:

    Ronald> All my lists were officially and publically terminated on
    Ronald> September 23 of last year.  We are now approaching the six
    Ronald> month aniversary of their demise.

    Ronald> Now, you were saying something about a ``reasonable time
    Ronald> afterwards'' ?

Clearly 6 months isn't a reasonable time afterwards in this case.
You're still getting queries. This is an operational problem for you
and cannot be a failing of the DNS protocol as your earlier postings
implied.

Don't you remember that I said domain names last forever?

The situation you're in is broadly comparable to the recent
renumbering of b.root-servers.net. [The server's old address is
hard-wired into obsolete configuration files all over the world that
can't or won't be updated.] Even though there's no compelling need to
do so, the old IP address of b.root-servers.net is still responding as
a root server. The old root server still gets traffic that should
really be going somewhere else. IIUC it will continue to respond to
that traffic for at least a year, probably more. That's the sort of
time-scale you should be looking at for your anti-spam lists. BTW, by
keeping the old address of B alive, the server's operator is trying to
ensure nothing breaks for these systems that have out of date
configurations.