On Tue, 2004-03-30 at 21:44, Bruce Richardson wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 30, 2004 at 10:34:07PM +0200, Leonardo Boselli wrote:
> > I got an error sending to *@altavista.* ( either .it or .com or fr or ... is the
> > same).
> > " all relevant MX records point to non-existent hosts "
> >
> > It looks that the MX record is just
> > altavista.com. 76 IN MX 0 .
> > of course "." does not resolve well ...
> > host altavista.* resolve always to 209.73.164.90 ...
> >
> > the p[roblem is either with exim 4.30 and 3.36
>
> The problem isn't with either of those: it's with Altavista's DNS.
FSVO `problem'. The record is intentional, and `MX 0 .' has a
well-known, if not RFC-supported, meaning.
> Nobody's going to have fun e-mailing them until that is fixed.
It's not *going* to be `fixed'. There are /no/ valid e-mail addresses at
altavista.* and a number of other domains that are registered to them.
*@av.com is potentially valid,
@altavista.{com,net,co.uk,dk,it,blah,blah} is forged.
Altavista shut down their e-mail services in April 2002, and recently
(within the last few weeks) changed the MX record to make that painfully
obvious. There's also an SPF record for each of the domains; for
instance:
<quote>
adam@kaa:~$ dig altavista.it txt
[...]
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;altavista.it. IN TXT
;; ANSWER SECTION:
altavista.it. 7200 IN TXT "Null SPF is for
tracking purposes only"
altavista.it. 7200 IN TXT "All mail claiming to be
from altavista.it is forged"
</quote>
There is a draft FAQ put together by one of the guys from av, but I'm
not going to post the URL here as I'm not sure if it's been made
generally available yet.
Adam
