Pants Full of Unix

First off, the reason to do this is that lots of places (notably, anything Brad Fitzpatrick touches…) now weight PTR records matching things like /(dsl|static)-[0-9]+-[0-9]+-[0-9]+-[0-9]+/ as indicating spam. Which, you know, I understand, but it’s a pain for people who maintain their own mail servers and have one of the less-than-ideal ISPs. When I moved into Philly, I was forced to switch from Speakeasy (who I liked very much, and do PTR records without any muss or fuss quickly) to Verizon Business DSL (you don’t get static IPs from Verizon without the business service), and I presumed that getting reverse DNS was going to be a hassle, so I put off doing the research.

After I got around to doing the research, I read various accounts describing pain and irritation, but found several that were successful of which Dean Gibson’s post to the postfix mailing list is the most complete I bothered to record in delicious:

http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/postfix/2003-07/2967.html

That made made me think it wasn’t going to be a big deal, but I put it off some more (”about a year”, I think) because I was lazy and wasn’t seeing all that much lost mail. I’m still both of those things, but I was going through doing some setup for email at moonbar.net for some of the Apothecary folks (configuring SPF for the domain to forward allowability on through to _spf.google.com, so that they can just spoof the source address in GMail and not deal with my requirements around IMAPS and SMTP with SSL authentication), so I figured I’d clean this up too. It turns out it’s even easier now! Here’s what you do:

1. Email mmvbts@verizon.com the IP address domain mapping that you want.
2. Call 800-483-5325, choose option 3 for “Verizon enhanced products”, choose option 3 for “domain name services”.
3. Explain what you want and that you’ve sent the email (the account isn’t monitored, so you do have to call to tell them to look at it), verify your account information.
4. Wait 24 to 72 hours.

I’m currently in step 4, so I’ll update after I see how that goes…

Update: All set!

> server ns2.bellatlantic.net
Default server: ns2.bellatlantic.net
Address: 71.252.0.72#53
> 71.242.125.164
Server:         ns2.bellatlantic.net
Address:        71.252.0.72#53

164.125.242.71.in-addr.arpa     name = stow.eclipsed.net.

(Yes, they really do still have their primary external DNS in the bellatlantic.net domain.)