smtp.gnome.org's RBLs and false positives

[Andrea Veri <av gnome org>]

Hey,

we recently had a few false positives in regard of emails rejected
without a good rationale from a specific RBL provider, it being
dnsbl.njabl.org.

The relevant reject was related to the fact the sender mail server had
multiple A records and the RBL check was failing with:

Jun 25 13:56:13 restaurant postfix/smtpd[3383]: warning:
XXX.XX.XXX.XX.dnsbl.njabl.org: RBL lookup error: Host or domain name
not found. Name service error for name=XXX.XX.XXX.XX.dnsbl.njabl.org
type=A: Host not found, try again

I've removed it from the list [1] and I'm wondering whether it makes
any sense to keep relying on such external services. Olav originally
set RBLs up if I recall correctly and probably has something to say on
this.

It would be also great if we plan to keep using RBLs to find a list of
providers who are known to work as expected and don't provide random
failures like dnsbl.njabl.org did.


-- 
Cheers,

Andrea

Debian Developer,
Fedora / EPEL packager,
GNOME Infrastructure Team Coordinator,
GNOME Foundation Board of Directors Secretary,
GNOME Foundation Membership & Elections Committee Chairman

Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/~av