How do I set the PTR record for a Floating IP?
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×I cannot use this service for our legitimate email servers without floating IP + reverse DNS. It seems that, in order to block spammers, you are also blocking legitimate businesses. The right thing to do would be to find another way to block spammers.
I have been fighting spammers for 15 years. Cloud computing was a godsend for them. The latest tactic is to spin up a few servers, send out a bunch of spam on fresh IPs, then make them disappear. I’ve been fighting one spammer for 10 months who has used over 300 ranges of IPs and counting. This tactic you have of not allowing reverse DNS for floating IPs is not stopping a spammer that uses IPs for one day. It is stopping legitimate businesses that want to establish a long term reputation of credibility on a certain IP, something that spammers do not want to do. You are hurting and not helping.
Hey friends!
Just wanted to weigh in on this a bit. Currently adding and removing a floating IP from your account is difficult for us to track. This means that allowing SMTP would benefit spammers greatly, further hurting the function for legitimate customers. That isn’t your problem of course, but it is meant to show the depth of work that must be done around this before we could consider unblocking SMTP, which is the function that drives the need for a PTR record. Dealing with the use of our network by spammers continues to be a daily fight.
Please know that we do read your feedback and we do use it to inform our discussions around changes to the platform. While we make no promises, your feedback does serve a function and it is to advocate for the change that you request.
Always keep the feedback coming, we are continually thankful for it <3
Jarland
+1 to this.
I have another use case:
Let’s say that I’m using CloudFlare for whatever reason, for my site. If I use my main IP for mail, then I’ve revealed my main IP, defeating the purpose of CloudFlare. However, if I use a floating IP for mail, I now have insulation on the mail end for my main IP. If I get attacked on mail.myhost.net, I can just detach the floating IP, and my main site will continue unaffected.
This, however, won’t work without PTR records for floating IPs, as mail won’t work properly without forward and reverse resolving matching each other.
This question has apparently become stale. Is there any roadmap or expected general release date for floating IPs PTRs?
Really want to see this added… very important when we’re talking about using a 1:1 mapping between a droplet and a domain! Please let us know when this is going to be available.
+1 I have a feeling it will be more likely to be identified as a spammer with my mail server droplet which is behind a floating IP....
I’m worried about this also. What if I put real ip for my mail server? Would this help?
Only if said IP has a good reputation. That’s why I’m so interested, if you have a floating IP with a good rep you can keep using it when switching/upgrading servers.
Any updates on this? I signed up for digitalocean specifically to set up a small mail server.
I’m looking for alternatives, but I’d love to give you guys a chance.
You can set setup PTRs on the regular IP assigned only to the machine by changing the machine’s hostname to what the PTR record should be. The only difference is this IP is associated with that VM forever whereas a floating IP can be re-assigned.
How about now? 18 months later is there a plan to support PTR records for Floating IPs?
Is adding PTR records for floating IP’s on a roadmap to be done? Where do we add feature requests? Floating IP’s are useless if they break security measures such as reverse lookups.
Damn, just ran into this issue when migrating from Azure to DO. This isn’t good. Any ETA on this? Seems to be radio silence.
Hi Jarland,
Thank you for the reply and for finally giving a reasonable explanation on the rationale behind the decision to not allow PTR records.
Judging by the activity on this thread I’m sure you agree this is quite a serious issue for Digital Ocean’s customers so I hope the DO team can implement the IP tracking required and enable PTR records as soon as possible so we can finally use this potentially great feature.
Please keep us up to date with the progress and hopefully the DO team wont leave it another 3 years before responding as this can be quite disconcerting for those of us that do like to provide feedback.
To set the PTR for a Floating IP, please do the following:
This doesn’t seem to work - when I do this, it uses the non-floating IP associated with the droplet.
I agree. I am (or was) looking for alternatives to move from bluehost VPS, in part because of email deliverability and their issue with DKIM records. Now that I have SPF, DKIM and even DMARC set up, gmail still spams the server outbound emails because of the rDNS issue with floating IPs. Pretty much every server I run sends out email, and some are web stores. Makes little sense to move if the server mail doesn’t get to the users. A large reason for this was not to force my clients to use some other mail alternative for simple server messages.
Hoping for a solution. Everything else is spot on!
Adding my voice to this - PTR records on floating IP addresses are important
+1, No PTR record for a Floating IP, this makes the Floating IP useless.
This is a serious issue. Without reverse IP its not possible to send email without using a third party relay. Even if the droplet is not used a mailserver, being able to send emails is often critical even if its just to get notifications from cron tasks.
See the post here which gives an example of why PTR records are required:
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/i-can-not-send-emails-with-postfix
As others have pointed out, without PTR records floating IP’s in many cases are essentially useless.
+1 useless
+1 it would be nice to have this feature implemented
+1 I now have this issue too
+1 please userdefined PTR records or at least the option to set them to our floating IP
Hey, I know you guys are already very busy working your asses off to provide us this awesome service and I’m very thankful for that, but if it helps to somewhat prioritize your tasks a little bit more, then I would like to add my concerns to this issue as well :).
+1 having PTR for floating IP
Using domain as droplet name the PTR is simply created and sending e-mails with postfix null client is easy. But with the - very cool - floating IP this PTR-creation is broken.
However, since I have to send e-mails, my workaround is to use a 3rd party relay (in my case gandi) with user/password authentication at the relay. Found the steps in https://yousharedsite.wordpress.com/2017/03/19/how-to-configure-postfix-relay-in-centos-7/ (there for gmail). Just in case, the next reader have to sent emails too and is looking for a work-around.
Just rediculous this is not supported - just had to stop using my floating IP because of this after confirming Gmail does not accept email from my floating IP, but does accept email from the droplet IP with PTR record configured. Floating IP is now useless.