[SURBL-Discuss] multi.surbl.org doesnt resolve ??

Jeff Chan jeffc at surbl.org
Wed May 31 06:29:15 CEST 2006


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.



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