[CentOS] postfix - reject of incoming mail due to helo check??

Fri Feb 3 14:25:26 UTC 2012
Stephen Harris <lists at spuddy.org>

On Fri, Feb 03, 2012 at 08:02:32AM -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 7:01 AM, Stephen Harris <lists at spuddy.org> wrote:
> > a forward lookup matches. ?It is commonly considered "broken" for rDNS
> > to return a value that doesn't match forward DNS.
> 
> If you say something is "broken", you should quote the RFC with the
> MUST requirement that it breaks.  I don't think there is one for this.

RFC 1912 section 2.1
  http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1912
which says explicitly "Make sure your PTR and A records match."

Which leads to things like RFC 5451 section 2.4.3 ("iprev")
   http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5451#section-2.4.3

Regardless of what the RFCs may or may not say, rDNS is _untrusted_
without a forward lookup validation.

>  The forward and reverse naming control is delegated 2 different ways
> and may not be under the same person's control.   It is also

Irrelevant.  If I make my hosts rDNS claim it is "mail.google.com"
then no one should believe me 'cos the A record for that domain points
totally elsewhere.  rDNS without forward DNS validation is _untrusted_
data, and if you're performing security checks without validating the
data then you're doing it wrong.  This is ancient knowledge; as I said,
Sun patched Solaris NFS server to fix this gap over 15 years ago.

> relatively common to have multi-homed hosts with the same name for
> multiple interfaces,

Not a problem; rDNS and A record matching can still occur in this case.

>                      or connections that go through NAT where the host
> doesn't even know what source address will appear on its connections.

Not a problem; here it's the NAT address that matters and that needs
working rDNS and A record matching.

I'd agree that expecting HELO to match the IP address is wrong, but I'm
not asserting that.  I don't care about packet _contents_, I merely care
that DNS is configured in a manner that makes it trustable.

-- 

rgds
Stephen