Re: DNSBL and IPv6

On 25/10/2012 04:00, Steve Atkins wrote:
> On Oct 24, 2012, at 7:48 PM, "John Levine" <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>>> Depends what your intentions are.  If you're trying to do listwashing, you
>>>> may wall see DNSBL listings rather than bounces.  I like VERP just fine and
>>>> my lists use it, but I do get back FBL reports that are munged to the point
>>>> where I can't tell who complained.  But they rarely munge the IP.
>>> People trying to avoid listwashing will learn to munge the bottom bits of any
>>> IPv6 address.
>> Well, maybe.  Personally, I think the threat of listwashing is overstated.
>> The really slimy senders have lists so dirty that no amount of washing will
>> clean them.
>>
>> But anyway, I'm seeing a lot of assertions about how IPv6 mail will work,
>> and precious little running core or simulations.  As always, anyone want
>> to do some, you know, research?
> It's mostly dependent on how IPv6 addresses for mailservers (legitimate and
> otherwise) will be allocated, and how much IPv6 will be used for inter-domain
> email delivery. Do we have any data, or researched speculation, about that
> to work from?
>
I actually think getting any *useful* data about this would be very 
tricky at the moment, if not impossible.

I know that we can't use IPv6 anywhere. We have 4 broadband connections 
with different suppliers, and none support IPv6 yet, and the data centre 
we use for our servers also doesn't support IPv6 yet. I guess lots of 
people are in the same situation, especially smaller companies. This 
probably means that spammers in general won't be using IPv6 yet - would 
it be worth their hassle, given that most of their 'customers' won't 
have it. So, anyone who does have IPv6 MX servers will probably just be 
getting IPv6 mail from people like Google, and no one else.

So, it might be interesting to get data to see how widely IPv6 is used 
for email currently, but it's unlikely to be useful data to give us 
realistic ideas how spam will affect the IPv6 infrastructure in the 
future. eg, there may be virtually no IPv6 spam now, but it won't stay 
that way.



(My personal view is that IPv6 for widespread email use is well in the 
future. There is no huge advantage over IPv4 given that the number of 
MTAs is vastly smaller than the number of other Internet connected 
devices. For interoperability, everyone with an MTA will NEED an IPv4 
address for now. There are complexity issues especially to do with 
security, hacking protection, spam filtering etc. So, I think most mail 
admins will be leaving IPv6 turned off until they need to turn it on - 
which may take a while, since it'll be a catch-22 situation. What may 
trigger it is if someone like Google decides to turn OFF all IPv4 
support in their mail infrastructure, but I think that's unlikely for 
the foreseeable future...

MSAs may support IPv6 a lot sooner to support their IPv6 MUAs, but those 
won't have the spam issues.

I know this isn't an 'IETF approved' viewpoint, but it's mine, based on 
our customers)



-

Paul Smith Computer Services
Tel: 01484 855800
Vat No: GB 685 6987 53