Ticket Response

[Glen <glen at amsl.com>]

As I feared, it's not a good idea to cc a list on an RT submission, 
because followups from RT won't go to the list, and people will think 
we're not responding.

WG Chairs -

FYI, I did respond to Eric's message as follows.  We'll work with him to 
follow-up.  CC's of that conversation won't reach the list, but, as with 
all requests, we are responding and handling it.

Glen

On Fri May 09 12:10:14 2008, ekr at rtfm.com wrote:
> When I submitted my position paper today for the IETF RFC , I was a
> little
> surprised not to get the promised acknowledgement. A little digging
> around revealed that my mail was getting rejected by the IETF
> mail server, first with a timeout during initial hello:
> and ultimately with a reverse resolution failure:

> Note that my IP actually does resolve, though I admit not to the name
> of my machine. You can blame comcast for this one.
> limbo-randy3:~> nslookup 74.95.2.173
> Not sure what's going on here, but this seems like a new and rather
> undesirable configuration setting.

Hi Eric -

I'm sorry you're encountering problems.

We have not changed anything here recently, so I can't speak to the
past, but let me tell you what I see from this end:

Your machine HELO'ed as "romeo.rtfm.com"... except that host doesn't
seem to exist or resolve:

core3:/home/glen # host romeo.rtfm.com
Host romeo.rtfm.com.amsl.com not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

And while your IP address does resolve at this time:
core3:/home/glen # host 74.95.2.173
173.2.95.74.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer
74-95-2-173-SFBA.hfc.comcastbusiness.net.

... it is possible that, earlier, it wasn't resolving.

At any rate, I'm happy to do whatever you like, but I disagree that
rejecting obviously differing data is undesirable, simply because of the
strong desire of "the community" to be spam-free.

Would it be possible for you to add your host to your domain so it
resolves? Would it be possible for Comcast to reverse-delegate your IP
block to you, or set up more accurate reverse resolution records for
you? Would it be possible for your outgoing mail to relay through your
ISP's authoritative mail server, to ensure that resolution works?

Here are things I can do to compensate:

1. I could whitelist your IP address in our access tables (pointless if
you're dynamic).

2. I could whitelist your "rtfm.com" domain (very cool name) in our
access tables. Or your email address.

Or, of course, I could gloablly disable the check for invalid hostnames
systemwide. But tell me your thoughts, because at first glance I would
be extremely uncomfortable taking such a broad action, potentially
opening the door for more spam problems, without talking and thinking
this through.

Also, I've cc'ed the wgchairs list on this response - because you cc'ed
them on your ticket filing - but I cannot leave the list as a permanent
ticket cc because of the potential for floding. So when you file a
ticket, I'd recommend not cc'ing the whole world - or at least not
mailing lists - since RT can be a bit, umm, "difficult" about things
like that.

Glen