Re: relays.ordb.org returning positive for everything?

> On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 11:50 PM, John Rudd <jrudd@...> wrote:
>> mouss wrote:
>>  > ajx wrote:
>>  >> It seems your logic is fundamentally flawed for several reasons.  By
>>  >> returning false positives, you're breaking mail gateways that use this
>>  >> once
>>  >> useful service. On the contrary, the best way would be to simply return a
>>  >> DNS host not found error or a connection refused message when a client
>>  >> tries
>>  >> to make contact to the service... This would reduce your bandwidth and
>>  >> not
>>  >> confuse and frustrate any users...
>>  >>
>>  >>
>>  >
>>  >
>>  > It is your logic that is flawed.
>>
>>  > Returing an error brings nothing at
>>  > all.
>>
>>  Which is exactly why it is better.  It brings no false positives.
>>  That's infinitely better than returning all false positives.
>>
>>
>>
>>  > the error is ignored since it has no practical consequence (except
>>  > maybe in some unread log file)
>>
>>  Unread/unchecked only by half-assed postmasters who aren't worth their
>>  salt, and should thus be fired.
>>
>>
>>  A decent postmaster at least generates summaries of traffic (perhaps via
>>  cron), and will note that one of their DNSBLs dropped from "lots of hits
>>  per day" to "no hits per day", wonders why, and looks into the problem.
>>   These responsible postmasters (who may have missed any notification of
>>  the impending death of the DNSBL they use) do not deserve to have the
>>  headaches caused by generating "all false positives".  They will get
>>  angry calls from users whose mail was returned to the senders (many of
>>  whom will not resend, some of whom are even so lazy as to not even read
>>  bounce reports).  In short, returning an always block result from a
>>  deprecated DNSBL effectively, and inappropriately, penalizes the
>>  responsible postmasters who do in fact check the results, and
>>  investigate why things changed.
>>
>>
>>  A postmaster who doesn't check their logs in any fashion deserves
>>  whatever they get.  Including having all of the spam sail through
>>  unchecked.  Or having their domain actually RBL'ed (ie. routed to null)
>>  because they've continued to do queries well past any reasonable
>>  expiration period.
>>
>>
>>  Generate all misses:  doesn't penalize the good postmasters, don't care
>>  about the effect on the bad postmasters.
>>
>>  Generate all hits: penalizes the good postmasters, don't care about the
>>  effect on the bad postmasters.
>
> I think you're mistaken.  Generating all hits does not penalize a
> "good" postmaster, because no good postmaster will be using an RBL
> that's been dead for over a year.