MAIL servers hostname, they will catch you!!

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Posted by earthdance, 07-05-2005, 05:59 AM
I just found out that even though my reseller provider promises 100% anonymous service my users still see their hostname in the e-mail headers , which is not the same as their main website but a random name. The thing is that since that domain doesnt match MY domain people might get suspicious and google it .. well I did that exact same thing and guess what I found..., many posts on forums talking about my provider and that hostname.... Isnt this a really bad thing and how do you deal with this? I also learned from my host that a dedicated IP would not solve this since it is only one domain per mailserver, per server.
Posted by pmabraham, 07-05-2005, 06:48 AM
Greetings: Setting up 100% guaranteed anonymous services for a reseller would be a very huge investment. The IP addresses assigned to the reseller would have to be swiped so they appear to be owned by the reseller if some one did an ARIN (or related LATNIC, APNIC, RIPE) look up -- http://www.arin.net/whois/index.html. If the provider, or even you as the reseller, are not careful, google.com can be used to determine not only vulnerabilities (called google hacking at least that is what sans.org calls it), but also identification. You also have hostnames, email server greetings, and more. I guess the bottom line is that if being anonymous is required, you are probably looking at a dedicated or co-located server in terms of coming close on your own (you still have the IP ownership issue). Thank you.
Posted by Cloudster, 07-05-2005, 06:54 AM
If the IP space is owned by your datacentre - problems solved
Posted by pmabraham, 07-05-2005, 07:09 AM
Greetings: As long as any marketing literature speak truthfully about the data center ownership, then the problem is solved under those circumstances. Thank you.
Posted by WebSpider, 07-05-2005, 07:20 AM
In an email message, there is often headers such as: Return-path: Received: from reseller by something.DisguisedHostName.com with ... And often doing a whois or searching on the net for DisguisedHostName will reveal who the real host is. Isn't there any way for the host to configure the mail server to mask DisguisedHostName in the mail headers by substituting it with the resellers domain name instead?
Posted by earthdance, 07-05-2005, 08:44 AM
I am wondering the same thing myself.
Posted by pmabraham, 07-05-2005, 08:54 AM
Greetings: Yes, if you had your own mail server through them. Thank you.
Posted by earthdance, 07-05-2005, 09:04 AM
Will a VPS allow me to have my own mailserver hostname?
Posted by (Stephen), 07-05-2005, 09:29 AM
Just of quick note, when you have mail, you need rDNS, when you have rDNS you have to present a real name, and it is not intelligent enough to know "oh that is a reseller" and send the correct rDNS, so it must be set on one domain. I guess if you wanted all mail to go via a vps, and you could configure a mailserver yourself, you could do that, but don't expect and control panel integration to that.
Posted by layer0, 07-05-2005, 09:35 AM
Yes. A VPS allows your own hostname. But, if you offer your own resellers and have a branded hostname it's even worse . -GSV
Posted by WebSpider, 07-05-2005, 11:06 AM
So there is no real 100% anonimity for the reseller. Why do hosts claim that then? Even with DisguisedHostName.com being registered with no information linking back to the host, someone could post somewhere saying "My host is XYZ Hosting and they asked me to use nsX.DisguisedHostName.com" as my name servers...". and that would be enough to do the damage.
Posted by earthdance, 07-12-2005, 01:11 AM
So the only solution to this is going Dedicated or VPS?
Posted by ioZoom, 07-12-2005, 01:27 AM
If your client searched that hostname and get 2,000 results listing 1,000 different companies using that hostname, how will they know which company it belongs to?
Posted by ldcdc, 07-12-2005, 10:50 AM
Who it belongs to is rather unimportant. Based on those results the client can consider that chances are he's a reseller, and I believe that's basically all that matters (in terms of our discussion here at least). Most such customers (who investigate in such depth) don't really care who the upstream provider is, but whether the host is (or might be) a reseller or not. We've all read the posts where people state "I don't want a reseller."
Posted by ioZoom, 07-12-2005, 12:25 PM
You have a point but that still doesn't mean that the account isn't anonymous as originally posted and what I believe the OP was concerned about.
Posted by tracphil, 07-12-2005, 12:32 PM
I would hope that you are not trying to push on your clients that you have control over the servers that their website is on... if you are doing that as a reseller then there are more problems to deal with than anonomous web/mail/dns etc services.