about the A and PTR for sending mail

Chuck Swiger cswiger at mac.com
Thu Nov 10 02:11:17 UTC 2011


On Nov 9, 2011, at 5:57 PM, 风河 wrote:
> I have two server IPs, the A records for them are:
> 
> mail.dnsbed.com.        300     IN      A       74.117.233.4
> mail.dnsbed.com.        300     IN      A       74.117.232.204
> 
> The corresponding PTR records are:
> 
> 4.233.117.74.in-addr.arpa. 36466 IN     PTR     dnsbed.com.
> 204.232.117.74.in-addr.arpa. 36453 IN   PTR     dnsbed.com.

So a double-reverse lookup check will fail, because the PTR records go to dnsbed.com and not to mail.dnsbed.com.

> But this setting can't make email sending successful.
> The Postfix system says:
> 
> postfix/smtp[13775]: A65713180D9: to=<***@freenet.de>,
> relay=mx.freenet.de[195.4.92.211]:25, delay=1.2,
> delays=0.29/0.02/0.76/0.16, dsn=5.0.0, status=bounced (host
> mx.freenet.de[195.4.92.211] said: 550 inconsistent or no DNS PTR
> record for 74.117.233.4 (see RFC 1912 2.1) (in reply to RCPT TO
> command))
> 
> 
> Is there any RFC item said the A and PTR records must be consistent?
> And why they must?

Why, yes-- by "see RFC 1912 2.1", they mean:

  http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1912.txt

This is only a "should" recommendation, and not a "must" requirement.  freenet.de appears to be enforcing a rather strict policy check here, but a DNS mismatch is a decent indicator of spammy mailservers; I'd use it for scoring purposes myself, and not as an absolute pass/fail.

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck




More information about the bind-users mailing list