justbits
More fiber than ATT can handle
Premium
join:2003-01-08
Chicago, IL
 ·AT&T Midwest
·AT&T Yahoo
| This is a great way for AT+T to lose some of the more advanced customers that run services from their home DSL line.
With this change, the primary alternatives are:
* switch to a different provider that provides a static IP address. (For me, SpeakEasy, Covad, Lightning Bolt DSL, maybe others.)
* switch to a business package that has a static IP address.
* find a third party to pay that provides wildcard email domain address forwarding.
Unless this is a marketing decision to get people running email servers to switch to business accounts (non-RBLed static IPs), I don't see how preventing wildcard email domains is a spam or security threat to AT+T/Yahoo. I can see how this makes complete sense for "free" Yahoo! accounts where anybody can create an account, abuse it, and leave it. However, AT+T/Yahoo's service is directly tied to monetary payments and a billing system that can physically locate the person responsible for a particular email account.
If they're worried on the technical side that someone may decide that they want to send as *@gmail.com, I can understand where that trust issue comes from. Therefore, I propose doing something similar to what Google Apps requires. Require that the customer provide a DNS record that AT+T Yahoo generates, and can thus verify by a DNS lookup.
Google does domain verification by requiring the customer to create a new DNS CNAME record, such as:
googlefffffafbfcfdfefg.mydomain.com. CNAME google.com.
By having the customer modify their DNS domain information, this provides sufficient proof that the requester owns that particular domain and has the capability to edit the DNS records for that domain.
I understand that adding a DNS verification method to validate wildcarded email domains for email verification could require significant work on AT+T/Yahoo's side of the world and that it probably can't be done overnight. But, it's a solution to a problem that they're otherwise ignoring that could result in an exodus of a certain kind of AT+T/Yahoo customer.
Another alternative that AT+T could provide to solve my problem is single static IP addresses. I'd be happy to pay $5/month (maybe $10/month) to get a single static IP address that is NOT listed in any RBL (realtime black list). As I understand it, single static IPs can be done with changes to PPPoE Authentication on the customer side (@static.sbcglobal.net?) and configuration on the Redback(s). I'm sure there are several blocks of addresses out there that AT+T hasn't registered with RBLs as dynamic IP addresses. |
