Subject: RE: [Asrg] Comments on draft-church-dnsbl-harmful-01.txt

From: "Nick Nicholas" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 10:51:24 -0800

On Thursday, March 30, 2006 at 10:22 AM Tony Finch wrote:

> AFAICT there is a very solid de-facto standard for both IP 
> address blacklists and mail domain blacklists, and this 
> standard is implemented interoperably by practially all DNS 
> blacklists and MTAs. What's the problem?

Would you care to describe what you see as the characteristics of this
de-facto standard?  To what extent does the document at
<http://www.shaftek.org/publications/drafts/draft-irtf-asrg-bcp-blacklis
ts-00.txt> describe the de-facto standard?

Regards,

Nick

--
 
Nick Nicholas
Knowledge Engineer
Habeas Inc.
650-694-3320
[email-masked]

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From: der Mouse <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 14:14:16 -0500 (EST)

>> AFAICT there is a very solid de-facto standard for both IP address
>> blacklists and mail domain blacklists, and this standard is
>> implemented interoperably by practially all DNS blacklists and MTAs.
>> What's the problem?
> Would you care to describe what you see as the characteristics of
> this de-facto standard?  To what extent does the document at
> <http://www.shaftek.org/publications/drafts/draft-irtf-asrg-bcp-blacklists-00.txt>
> describe the de-facto standard?

Well, I'm not Tony Finch; I didn't write the double-quoted text.  But I
think I understand it, and, based on that (possibly mis-)understanding,
here's my reaction to what you wrote:

* For an IP address BL with lookup domain foo.example-bl.org, to look
   up IP address A.B.C.D, query for D.C.B.A.foo.example-bl.org.

* For a domain BL with lookup domain bar.example-bl.org, to look up the
   domain quux.example.com, query for
   quux.example.com.bar.example-bl.org.

Listings are indicated by A records (with 127.0.0.2 being perhaps the
commonest address returned, but by no means the only); TXT records
provide more detail, often suitable for direct use in an SMTP rejection
message.

Based on the table of contents of draft-irtf-asrg-bcp-blacklists-00 at
the URL you gave, it is orthogonal to this.  This is an interface
standard and does not address blacklist policy at all; the draft you
point to describes policy rather than interface details.  Indeed, the
introduction says "This note [...lists] guidelines for management of
public blacklists".  Note "management"; how the list is managed is
orthogonal to how its query interface is defined.

Incidentally, note that the IP-address interface described above makes
no provision for IPv6.  This will eventually have to change; we may
want to start thinking about those changes now.

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