On Tuesday, May 30, 2006, 7:02:20 AM, surbl-discuss surbl-discuss wrote:
Hi everyone
Please forgive me if this question has been answered recently but I have only joined the list today. My question is
multi.surbl.org no longer resolves to an IP address - is it still the preferred hostname to use?
The reason I ask is because our mailgateway product uses this as one of its tests and our support company seem to be getting nowhere finding out whats wrong or who to ask
Upon investigation, we found that if we disabled the spam rule that checks multi.surbl.org, then connections went back to normal - so I then tried to ping multu.surbl.org and when I couldnt ping it I put two and two together and assumed it was down. When I couldnt ping it a week or so later, I thought Id post and ask.
You cannot ping multi.surbl.org or any of the lists, and you should not try. All that does is create unnecessary, undesirable and unanswerable network traffic. Therefore if you are pinging, please stop it. Same goes for everyone.
Like most blacklists, the data is represented as subdomains, so if you:
dig foo.com.multi.surbl.org a
and foo.com is blacklisted, then the address record will return some value as described at:
http://www.surbl.org/lists.html#multi
and:
http://www.surbl.org/implementation.html
If foo.com is not blacklisted, then the result is NXDOMAIN.
If you want to test for the existence of the lists, you could query a testpoint:
http://www.surbl.org/faq.html#testpoints
However with 40+ nameservers, the lists are not going away and any tests are probably just unnecessary DNS traffic that we would prefer not be done.
PS I work for a smallish organisation (<500) users, would it be worth my while rsyncing the DNS zone locally?
If your mail serve handles less than 100,000 mesages per day then it's probably not worth the overhead. This is described at:
http://www.surbl.org/rsync-signup.html
Cheers,
Jeff C. -- Don't harm innocent bystanders.