I'll respond since I'm (a) the person who you tried to mail and it bounced, and (b) the operator of the rfc-ignorant.org database which causes you said grief.

The bottom line is that you want a service (customizeable reverse DNS) that your provider won't give you, which begs the question of "why do you keep paying a provider money to give you a service which isn't what you actually want?"

Your ISP's present configuration doesn't allow your IP address to be associated with any "competent" (e.g., unix-girl.com) domain. They force you to associate your machine as being one of theirs, which means a recipient machine has no way of knowing to look at your hostname that you are somehow the random percentage of snet.net that is competent in its administration.

For what you pay for DSL, it is not entirely unheardof to get yourself some rackspace in a shared rack, with competent management, at which point you get what you want, not what this DSL provider has told you "you'll suffer with".

It's not about what I can do to change this.. I can move my smtp server easily..

My point is, you're punishing customers for something they completely have no control over.. it's counterproductive and it'll just get people like me pissed off and annoyed.

Out of the thousand customers SNET has, how many do you think run smtp servers.. and out of that very small persentage how many do you think would even know what this is about? Then say every one of *those* people does call SNET and complain.. it's a drop of water in an ocean.. SNET won't care..

But you see, partly the point *is* to annoy customers like you. *I* (and the many other recipient sites) don't pay SNET money, you do. *WE* have no leverage over SNET to get them to change their ways other than groveling and begging.

CUSTOMERS have plenty of leverage, because they can stop paying and move their patronage elsewhere. The whole point of such listings is to convince customers at $LISTED_SITE, who are having problems sending mail, to complain to the people they pay money to that they should fix $PROBLEM.

We had a MUCH more harsh battle about this recently when we listed every UUNet IP address, worldwide for about a month and a half, give or take. In the end, after receiving many many complaints from customers the UUNet/Worldcom behemoth actually moved and fixed the problem.

And, on that point, let me say that even *my own* servers were listed, since I get my connectivity in my colo'ed space from UUNet. So strong is my conviction in this that I was willing to shoot myself in the foot like that on the principle of the matter. :)

I think this is completely the *wrong* way of going about it.. SNET is not a huge national ISP.. the numbers are vastly different from uu.net as will be the number of people who even notice this.

How much you want to bet I'm the only one so far? I don't have other service option for this.. not w/o going colo and that is not an option here.

So basically you're punishing me.. a person who is actively anti-spam and outspoken about it as well...

You want me pissed off? Succeeded.. but there's nothing I can do here.. I spent years trying to get SNET to provide reverse DNS and failed.. what makes you think this battle will be any different?

Don't forget, CT is very much different from California when it comes to provider availability.. we don't have nearly as many options in the backwater towns here.

I think you're forgetting I spent the last year entombed in CT, and have moved to the sticks of NY where it's actually worse. :)

Thats' right! All the more you should have sympathy for us poor hicks stuck with a lously dsl provider and no other option.

Blacklisting entire netblocks (like in this case) and 3. party relays (like ISP servers relaying for a customer with an open relay) is always problematic. The idea is, as Derek points out, to punish the customers enough to make them force their ISP into fixing the problems that caused them to be listed in the first place.

I know it's causing a lot of headache when your servers somehow ends up in a RBL, especially when are not the cause of the listing and there's nothing you can do to get out. Over time you learn to live with it and ask people that complain about not being to able to get mail from you to stop using the less serious RBL's, like rfc-ignorant.org and *.monkeys.com. I like the political signal from rfc-ignorant.org (you should have a working abuse adresse, accept bounces and have a correct and public available whois record) but it's the kind of service the impacts too many innocent users.

I don't know the ARIN rules for delegating reverse DNS for LIR customers but here in Europe everyone with a /24 or bigger allocation is entitled to get a delegation to their own servers. At TDC Internet (where I work) we provide CIDR delegations for /29 and larger and everyone, even those with a /32 can get a custom PTR record.

Point: the RFCs should be implemented correctly.

Point: customers' _control_ over the vendor is about $20 per month.

On the other hand, customers' _influence_ over the vendor is > $20 per month, because the vendor wants happy customers. Happy customers don't cancel their accounts, and, more importantly, _sell_ to their friends.

If the anonymous vendor doesn't care, then you have no influence -- unless you can put a face to the vendor. Why? Because the company is _not monolithic_ but composed of thousands of workers, some of whom care.

The trick is finding those workers, and using that leverage point to effect change. rfc-ignorant.org, while a very informative site, is a blunt intrument.

YOU KNOW WHATS PISSES ME OFF? I HAD A HOTMAIL EMAIL ACCOUNT AND THOSE ASSHOLES ERASED 100 OF MY STORED MESSAGES WITH NOT EVEN A WARNING.IN ONE DAY THEY JUST DECIDED TO CHANGE THEIR FORMAT TO SAY THEY DELETE ANY SENT MESSAGES OVER 30 DAYS OLD, REGARDLESS OF WHETHER YOU WERE OVER YOUR 2 MEG ACCOUNT LIMIT (WHICH I WAS NOT!!!).
THEN I TRIED TO SEND AN EMAIL OF COMPLAINT FOR BEING ABUSED BY HOTMAIL ITSELF AND THEY DID NOT EVEN HAVE SUCH A SERVICE, THEY JUST SENT MY EMAIL BACK. ASSHOLES. I HATE HOTMAIL!!! THOSE FUCKING BASTARDS!!! I"LL NEVER TRUST THEM AGAIN!!!