[afrinic-anti-spam-discuss] DNS whitelisting

[Graham Beneke]

Hi All

I mentioned my use of DNS whitelisting at the anti-spam BoF that was 
held at AfriNIC-7. There was some interest in the technique so here are 
details so that others can try it.

I would welcome discussion and comments on your experience.

At this stage there is no website or information available online about 
the system - I hope to remedy that in the coming months. There is 
however a very similar project being run by a European email 
administrator. The site for this project is www.dnswl.org and my system 
has much in common with this project.

The whitelist currently contains most of the major mail servers in South 
Africa as well as a number of smaller servers from around SA and the 
rest of the continent. The list is by IP address and it is queried in 
the same way that RBL's are queried.

If you want to find out how to query the whitelist or integrate it with 
your MTA I suggest that you read the info at http://www.dnswl.org/tech 
as it covers most of the major MTA's and spam filtering tools. Just note 
that the DNS root of my whitelist is 'wl.apolix.co.za' and you should 
replace 'list.dnswl.org' with this wherever it appears in the configuration.

I would be happy to go into more detail on any aspect - please post your 
questions to the list.

Additionally - I would appreciate any contributions to the whitelist. 
You can send me a mail offlist with: IP address, rDNS hostname, 
organisation that runs the server.

regards
Graham Beneke