Spam and extra MX records

Ben Scott dragonhawk at gmail.com
Tue Apr 15 12:20:00 EDT 2008


On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 9:44 AM, Neil Joseph Schelly
<neil at jenandneil.com> wrote:
> I've read a couple suggestions which make a good deal of
>  sense to me, but just feel wrong.

  These may or may not work right now.  I suspect they'll foil some
spam attempts right now.

  They'll also decrease the overall health of your mail system.
You'll have more mail problems than before.  Some of that may be due
to non-compliant MXes out there in the world, but there are a huge
number of those, and if even one of those is important to you, that
makes you unhappy.  If you're willing to write those senders off, that
won't be a problem, but I find most people aren't willing to do so.

  Personally, I also find these kinds of strategies very rude.  You're
increasing *my* mail server's load because *you're* not willing to
implement a proper anti-spam solution.  Don't be a jerk about your
mail system.  That makes you part of the problem -- not much better
than the spammers.

  Mostly, though, I'm against these kinds of things because they are a
doomed strategy.  If enough people start doing it, the spammers *will*
adapt.  They've already started doing so for greylisting-- modern
botnets follow proper SMTP retry protocol, or so I've read.

  I also have a suspicion (totally unsubstantiated) that most spammers
don't really care about MX priority.  I suspect they just look for
every MX they can find and fire spam at all of them.  The reason
secondary MXes have a rep for being an avenue for spam is that people

  Personally, unless you're multi-homed or very large, I don't seem
much purpose for multiple MX records these days anyway.  Well, maybe
if your primary MX is incredibly unreliable, but if so, the proper
thing to do is fix your MX.

-- Ben


More information about the gnhlug-discuss mailing list