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Re: dynamic ip: cold hard facts

To: Larry <lweldon@welcoin.com>
Subject: Re: dynamic ip: cold hard facts
From: Peter Serwe <peter@infostreet.com>
Date: Wed, 31 Jan 2007 13:39:02 -0800
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Not only is there disagreement of what is reasonable but I think there
is disagreement on what is legitimate. A commercial entity with a need
to email from a dynamic IP range may consider its' needs legitimate. A
person receiving spam email from that same range may well judge the need
as illegitimate.

Your previous post described a situation where you couldn't get good
mail service. The average home or casual business user might overcome
that with a gmail, yahoo, hotmail, or other account and proceed with
their email. A person who needs to run a list or who has a need to have
a domain and host it himself must either have a static IP or resort to
dyndns or another agent for a pseudo static.

That does not automatically make that entity a legitimate sender of
email. Static IP addresses are sources of spam, but dynamic zombies are
also, and are as well sources of viruses.

Scenario #1:

Right. Let's assume that at home I have this groovy broadband service over Fiber
that I really like from a home broadband provider.

Getting a static IP address from them is a complete PITA, and possibly impossible, but using the router they provided to do a port-forward for a few ports from the public address to a psuedo-dynamic DHCP address in my house is pretty easy. That, coupled with registration of my 'dynamic' address with dyndns.org gives me a complete forward dns solution. It still doesn't give me a reverse dns solution,
but it's enough, and I  now have an MX record that points to a CNAME of that
dyndns.org entry.

Now. I've gone to a hell of a lot of trouble to attempt to legitimize my non-static, yet not really dynamic entry (the provider's DHCP server never really changes that address anyway), but everyone decides to block my mail because they recognize
the server as being on a 'dynamic' address range.

Maybe I use that server to test sexy new qmail configurations I can't play with on the work's resources without breaking something. Maybe I just want to host my
own damn domains on my own damn bandwidth that I pay for with money from
my own damn pocket.   What makes that illegitimate?

GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out. In this case, the initial garbage is the data that
calls one range dynamic and another static.

Scenario #2:

Similiar to #1, but the link is a SDSL (recently renamed 'T1' by the marketing dweebs, but a *real* T1 doesn't run into a Covad Netopia router, doesn't run over a pair of copper, and doesn't have a 16,000' hard distance limitation with a 14,000' usable limit :P), that runs into my office. An entire class C is routed through it. My business DSL provider doesn't really like to respond to reverse DNS updates, so most of my forwards don't reverse properly.

I run mail out of my office through it, rather than pipe it out to colocation and spew it forth from there. Is that dynamic or static? Who makes that call? Who are you to judge? We don't SPAM anywhere for anything, but you're going to block legitimate mail possibly from my office because I don't relay through 'approved' ip blocks? How is that an indicator of
SPAM?


--
Peter Serwe <peter at infostreet dot com>

http://www.infostreet.com

"The only true sports are bullfighting, mountain climbing and auto racing." 
-Earnest Hemingway

"Because everything else requires only one ball." -Unknown

"Do you wanna go fast or suck?" -Mike Kojima

"There are two things no man will admit he cannot do well: drive and make 
love." -Sir Stirling Moss


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