2023-09-23: RFC2 is shutting down.
On 2012-09-15, RFC-Ignorant shut down, after approximately 11 years of service. Shortly after, RFC-Clueless uploaded the established RFC-Ignorant lists and began managing them through http://rfc-clueless.org/ and publishing the DNSBL under the rfc-clueless.org domain. This month marks its own 11 year mark of managing these lists, and just like RFC-Ignorant, it's time to shut-down.
The immediate impetus for shutting-down, like many non-profit projects, can be traced to hardware failure. The RAID controller on the database host failed. While we could rebuild the machine, restore the database, and continue on; it's unclear if there's commensurate value in doing so.
The eMail landscape in 2023, even more than in 2012, is increasingly controlled by monoliths who are treated as "Too Big to Fail", and frankly don't care about decorum or standards upon which the Internet community was built. It's our observation that, because of the need of most mail operators to whitelist these major players, this service principally serves to hurt smaller system.
While we've had success in helping inform and resolve issues with many small-to-medium size installations; on balance, the total impact on the eMail public based on this imbalance is likely negligible.
We suggest that you update your mail systems to remove any rfc-clueless lists at this point. Beyond that, the following is our target timeline:
- 2023-09-23 - http://rfc-clueless.org/ functionality is disabled. There is no more list management support.
- 2023-11-01 - DNSBL lists will be set to always return "pass", i.e. be emptied.
- 2023-02-01 - DNSBL lists will be retired (set to NXDOMAIN)
Thank-you again for your interest in the project.
About RFC2
RFC2 is not a list of spammers.
RFC Ignorant
With RFC Ignorant closed down, we've expanded to include their lists. You can check to see if a hostname is contained in our lists by attempting to resolve one of the following patterns (generally you need only check whether the host resolves or not rather than worry about the exact IP).
- hostname.dsn.rfc-clueless.org resolves to 127.0.0.2
- hostname.postmaster.rfc-clueless.org resolves to 127.0.0.3
- hostname.abuse.rfc-clueless.org resolves to 127.0.0.4
- hostname.bogusmx.rfc-clueless.org resolves to 127.0.0.8
The following list is deprecated, and will be removed by the end of the year 2020.
- hostname.whois.rfc-clueless.org resolves to 127.0.0.5 (or 127.0.0.7 if the TLD is listed)
Meta-lists
You can query all lists at once by querying hostname.fulldom.rfc-clueless.org, which will resolve to 127.0.0.1 if hostname is listed in any of our lists.
For more information, we direct you to the list of frequently answered questions