MX dot was (Re: [ietf-dkim] TXT wildcards SSP issues

[Steve Atkins]

On Jun 11, 2007, at 8:55 AM, Douglas Otis wrote:

>
> On Jun 11, 2007, at 5:43 AM, J.D. Falk wrote:
>
>> On 2007-06-09 17:01, Hector Santos agreed with John Levine:
>>
>>>> "It's all spam" is about the simplest useful advice a (non)  
>>>> sender can give.  In my case, which I don't think is unusual, I  
>>>> get buckets of spam and blowback to subdomains that have never,  
>>>> ever, sent a real message.  The domains are the names of  
>>>> computers on my network, which were probably scraped out of  
>>>> usenet or mail archive message IDs.  If receivers were to reject  
>>>> or drop all mail purporting to be from those domains, it would  
>>>> be uniformly better both for the receivers (less spam, cheap  
>>>> filter) and for me (less blowback.)
>>> +1
>>
>> +1
>
> 'Proof of use' as acceptance criteria should also eliminate much of  
> this.  Deprecating and then obsoleting A record discovery would  
> safely arrive at this goal.
>
> Use of * MX "." would be something a root server will be unable to  
> defending against.  If this were to become popular, these records  
> may lead to a type of DDoS attack against the root servers.  This  
> construct assumes millions of email applications will be modified  
> to recognize "." as an invalid domain name.

Why do you believe this?

Cheers,
   Steve