NDRs – We spoke too soon

The process we implemented to reject mail from mail servers that have no valid reverse DNS over the last few weeks was unfortunately very short lived one. Unfortunately, we’ll start accepting mail from servers with no reverse DNS entries, allowing our customers to accept mail from mail servers that should not exist on the Internet at all.

After a flurry of complaints we had no choice but to shut down the service that handled the rejections. Instead, we will allow them but will automatically assign a score high enough to qualify the host as SPAM. If this is a legitimate sender to whom you have sent mail in the past, or if you have them on your whitelist, they will get by our SPAM scanners and the host will thus have a better reputation which will keep it out of our internal blacklists. As for others, once they hit that treshold we will place them in our internal RBL and reject mail with the standard disclaimer giving them an option to remove themselves from or RBL’s.

This is not what we would have prefered to do but business is business, email is vital to it and when you complain about how much SPAM is out there remember that you amplify it by doing business with customers and partners that do not have a properly deployed and managed IT infrastructure.