> On Jun 6, 2018, at 5:11 PM, Brandon Long via mailop <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> Isn't the simplest way to handle this is to treat IPv6 at the /64 or smaller 
> level?  More likely, because most people use IPv4, the RBL's just don't have 
> the data sources they need to populate the data, not because of some inherent 
> size problem with the data.
> 

IPv6 blacklists served over DNS using "regular" DNS infrastructure risk blowing 
out the caches of recursive resolvers (theoretically) if the lookup is done by 
/128 - there are potentially many, many queries you might have to make without 
getting cache hits. It's better with /64, but that's potentially not as 
selective as you might want while still meaning more cache hits (in theory) as 
/48s are handed out like candy in a way /16s aren't.

I'm not sure I believe that it's an actual problem today, or one that's likely 
in the future, but there is a potential issue there.

Distributing IPv6 reputation data via something other than DNS eliminates the 
issue. It can still be provided to the MXes via DNS, just directly from a local 
authoritative server rather than via a caching resolver.

That'd be better in many respects. (The history of BGP not being trivial to 
feed into mailservers and the coincidence that m4-ed sendmail.cf can be 
persuaded to do DNS lookups are the only reason we're where we are.)


> I'm also not clear that content level scanning is really so much more 
> expensive that it can't be invested in.  "Here's a nickel kid, buy yourself 
> another VM" or something.  More likely, there's a trade-off in trusting RBLs 
> completely vs how much mail you receive, and as you scale up, the more 
> numerous the false positives from RBLs become (not as a fraction but as an 
> absolute number)  and the more effort you need to put into doing more 
> complicated evaluations even as your traffic is higher.

I think content scanning is critical. A significant fraction of the spam I see 
- and a large fraction of the spam that's not trivially blocked - is coming 
from shared infrastructure (whether that be ESPs, Large Webmail Providers or 
Large Hosted Business Apps). Content can block that. Source IP based blocking 
can't, really, as the sources are shared between legitimate users and spammers. 
And, to wander back to the topic, the majority of spam I see on IPv6 comes from 
those sorts of provider.

Cheers,
  Steve
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