As of September 15, 2012, the 12-year tenure of the RFC-Ignorant.org DNSBL has come to a close. Citing old hardware and a change in the nature of email deliveries where a small handful of large providers dominate the email landscape, the maintainer has made the decision to discontinue its operation. We certainly understand the “large provider” dominance of the Googles and Yahoos and Hotmails of the world; they’re “too big to block” even while they misbehave in ways that would get smaller providers quickly blacklisted.
Read the full announcement at http://www.rfc-ignorant.org/endofanera.php
We’ve copied the shutdown schedule below as well:
Effective 9/15/2012 – All publicly visible DNS slaves have been removed from the NS-set other than SONIC.NET’s primary RBL servers, a change that is percolating through DNS caches now
Effective 9/20/2012 – we will no longer accept submissions of new domains
Effective 9/30/2012 – All entries currently marked as “Listed” in the databases will be marked as “Deprecated”, which will cause them to not generate DNSBL entries. This will, effectively, mean that lookups of any domain in our database will always return “false”, i.e., “clean”.
Effective 10/15/2012 – The rsync service for slaving of zones will be shut down
Effective 10/30/2012 – All sub zones will have their NS-set set to “localhost.rfc-ignorant.org”, with lengthy TTLS, which will direct all DNS traffic back onto the server requesting it.
Effective 11/30/2012 – The root NS set for “rfc-ignorant.org” will be deleted entirely, preventing any resolution
As such, we will be administratively removing all references to rfc-ignorant.org from accounts utilizing it as part of their DNSBL configuration in order to eliminate our traffic burden towards the remaining name servers, and its ultimate shutdown.
