[Gllug] Hoo, boy

[Bruce Richardson]

On Wed, Mar 31, 2004 at 11:14:20AM +0100, Matthew wrote:
> Bruce Richardson wrote:
> >>This beats most DNS stupidities I've ever seen:
> >>;; ANSWER SECTION:
> >>altavista.com.          425     IN      MX      0 .
> >Ah, apparently this is quite deliberate.  Move along, nothing to see
> >here.
> 
> Deliberate, but in an attempt to achieve what?

Altavista don't do mail any more, since they were bought out by Yahoo.
It's essentially a defunct domain.  They've published null SPF records
for the domains.  Pointing the MX record to "." turns out to be an
unofficial way of signalling that you don't receive mail, which is not
something I had come across before.  It makes sense: Well-behaved MTAs
will fail to resolve the record and just throw back an error message.  If
there were no MX record, MTAs would fall back to trying the
altavista.com A record (which does exist) and try opening an SMTP
connection to that, wasting everybody's time.

-- 
Bruce

The ice-caps are melting, tra-la-la-la.  All the world is drowning,
tra-la-la-la-la.  -- Tiny Tim.
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