Scores of people have been complaining about their email not reaching its destination. These are customers of Telnor's Prodigy dial-up service. The destinations of the homeless emails are often AOL, Yahoo and other large ISPs who subscribe to one of the many commercial "Blackhole Lists". These lists carry the names of various servers that are not properly configured (ie: bad or missing DNS files) or that allow floods of spam to pass through their networks. Telnor has a long-standing position on many of the RBLs (real-time black lists). For example, Telnor's email server just returned the following information from five-ten-sg.com:

IP address 148.233.15.97 is listed here as 148.233.213.224.prodigy.net.mx misc.spam.

The misc.spam group is mostly (but not entirely) composed of entire addresses blocks that have a) sent spam here, b) have consecutive or missing reverse dns, and c) have no customer sub-delegation via either the controlling RIR (ARIN, RIPE, LACNIC, APNIC, etc) or an rwhois server referenced in the main RIR records.

In particular, 148.233.15.97 has reverse dns of customer-148-233-15-97.uninet.net.mx. If your domain name does not appear as the last components in any of those reverse dns names, that needs to be fixed first. Also, none of those names has a forward dns mapping to the original 148.233.15.97. That needs to be fixed. Any email sent to the address at the top of this page will be ignored until that is fixed.

At present (Feb/2005), Telnor's Prodigy network is blacklisted by the following RBL providers:

What does this mean? Well, it means that email to your friend in Kansas or Ontario may or may not reach them, depending upon whether any of the servers it passes through during its journey subscribes to one of the RBLs that list Telnor within its nefarious roster.

It's up to Telnor to correct these problems and ensure that their customers are receiving what they paid for ---a dependable internet and email service.

What can you do to facilitate this goal? Try contacting Telnor's Prodigy branch and voicing your complaints. They can be reached HERE.

July 23/06

Telnor's Prodigy SMTP server problems are encapsulated by this return on their address search at JammConsulting.com:

IP address 148.235.52.50 is listed here as 148.235.166.93.uninet-ide.com.mx misc.spam.

The misc.spam group is mostly (but not entirely) composed of entire addresses blocks that have a) sent spam here, b) have consecutive or missing reverse dns, and c) have no customer sub-delegation via either the controlling RIR (ARIN, RIPE, LACNIC, APNIC, etc) or an rwhois server referenced in the main RIR records.

In particular, 148.235.52.50 has reverse dns of smtp.prodigy.net.mx. If your domain name does not appear as the last components in any of those reverse dns names, that needs to be fixed first. Also, either the PTR or A record has a TTL of 300 which is less than 3600 seconds. That needs to be fixed. Any email sent to the address at the top of this page will be ignored until that is fixed.

In my opinion, the following comment also applies to static ip addresses, where the provider does not actually identify the user of that ip address by domain name.

As Bill Cole points out: "The problem with people on dynamic addresses doing that otherwise perfectly reasonable and normal thing (sending mail directly from their ip address) is not that it violates a service contract (in itself it usually does not) but rather that the dynamic nature of the addresses and the sloppiness/laziness/cheapness of their providers makes it impossible for anyone who gets the mail to have anything useful as an audit trail for where the mail came from beyond identifying an IP address. ISP's historically have claimed that they cannot identify the guilty party and more often today fall back to amorphous and grotesquely unethical 'privacy' standards decreeing that they will not identify abusive users. By racing to the bottom on price and service quality, they have also managed to create an environment where it is impossible for them to remain economically viable and police their networks in any but the most coarse and restrictive ways. We have people shunning port 25 traffic from such networks not because it is inherently bad, but because those networks have no overall competent authority and no way for outsiders to determine a competent authority for any specific address at any particular time."