[cobalt-users] re: SMTP claims to be down but isn't

[John MacDonald <jmacdonald@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>  For example, to check to see if
>>  65.58.240.229 is on spamcop, you'd do 
>>  this:

>>  $ dig 229.240.58.65.bl.spamcop.net

Thanks Jeff,

This seems to work however the query time
is very inconsistent - ranging from 130ms to
850 ms...and once I even recieved a timeout.
Do you think that the delay/error message 
could be related to the fact that my Raq
does not host its own DNS? (We're using 
our ISP's because we are not hosting any
sites on this machine - its for mail only).
I'm also curious as to why my firewall 
doesn't show any DNS requests to the
blacklist hosts servers?...only UDP/53 
requests I see open in the firewall 
sessions are those to the DNS of our
ISP - Does this server relay the 
lookup request to the blacklist host
and then return it to us?

Thanks,
John