Cloudfare DNS = spamhaus.org rejection for inbound messages

I found out the hardway that if you switch from the default Google DNS servers (located in /etc/resolv.conf for Centos12) and use CloudFare DNS , which are faster for my server location of 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1 your inbound email will most likely fail as spamhaus.org will reject the query and reject the message.

Its been posted before somewhat here:

Apparently there is away around it but you have to sign up for something

Will be interesting to see if people are doing about this? Do people even care for 0.2ms DNS lookup difference?

If you still want to use Cloudflare public DNS here you have the doc to create a free DQS key and configure Exim to use it.

Email and mail server | Hestia Control Panel

I always use my own dns resolver (PowerDNS Recursor). Here a test using a few common public dns resolvers and my own resolver (127.0.0.1).

My own resolver isn’t the faster on a first query (it is the second faster) and that is because public resolvers could have the query already cached but it is fastest on average.

$ dnseval -f list-dns -c 25 -t A 127.0.0.127.zen.spamhaus.org
server        avg(ms)     min(ms)     max(ms)     stddev(ms)  lost(%)  ttl        flags                  response
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1.1.1.1       22.555      4.848       38.482      12.826      %0       2100       QR -- -- RD RA -- --   NOERROR             
1.0.0.1       9.053       4.829       37.138      9.087       %0       2100       QR -- -- RD RA -- --   NOERROR             
8.8.8.8       6.980       3.827       25.382      4.934       %0       N/A        QR -- -- RD RA -- --   NXDOMAIN            
8.8.4.4       4.186       3.781       4.603       0.215       %0       N/A        QR -- -- RD RA -- --   NXDOMAIN            
9.9.9.9       19.463      9.081       62.395      12.969      %0       2099       QR -- -- RD RA -- --   NXDOMAIN            
9.9.9.10      15.939      9.204       31.869      6.497       %0       2099       QR -- -- RD RA -- --   NOERROR             
127.0.0.1     0.939       0.056       21.717      4.329       %0       N/A        QR -- -- RD RA -- --   NXDOMAIN