Email: Moving away from Sender Verification Callouts and towards RBL Checking

[Michael D.]

We're no longer going to be checking to see if the email address that is sending the message exists before accepting it into our mail servers. The issue is that there are a lot of misconfigured mail servers out there that either don't properly respond to verification checks or that simply don't accept public connections. Both of these cases are against the RFC Guidelines for mail servers, but that doesn't stop servers from being misconfigured.

 

We've opted for blocking spam using the SpamCop and Spamhaus RBL systems. These systems are designed to track IP addresses that are used to transmit spam and as such using these RBLs should be effective at stopping a large portion of spam that would have hit the server had we simply turned off Sender Verification Callouts.

 

If you have any questions about this, let us know.

[mipra]

One week away from the change. I notice quite a hype on the SPAM. However, it was not an alarming rate. I would choose to stay this way to make sure all e-mails are received rather than otherwise.

[Michael D.]

One week away from the change. I notice quite a hype on the SPAM. However, it was not an alarming rate. I would choose to stay this way to make sure all e-mails are received rather than otherwise.

That's because 95% or more of spam is sent from addresses that don't actually exist.