The Murphy Builders Site

What the @#&% was that in English my son!??!

----- Original Message -----
From: "Daryl C. W. O'Shea" <dos@dostech.ca>
To: <rebel-builders@dcsol.com>
Sent: Sunday, September 12, 2004 9:42 PM
Subject: Re: Delivery failures

On Fri, 10 Sep 2004, Mike Davis wrote:

Not sure what caused that one, but I have been having a lot of problems

with

Shaw cable... and since there are 5 list members from shaw.ca, it crops

up a

lot. I put quite a bit of time into tracking down the problem with

Shaw,

and after contacting them they said, "yeah, that sounds about right...

can't

you just configure your system to accept any and all mail from shaw.ca?"
Well yes, but that kind of defeats the point in filtering spam!

Whitelisting all of the list member addresses on your border relay would
be just as effective as letting them through to the list and then bouncing
them. Unless you're getting a lot of spam from list member addresses, but
that's another issue.

What I've done for now is configure the filter to accept all mail

addressed

to the list... then the list server will have to bounce the bogus

addresses.

This may sound like a real good solution, but the list gets several

thousand

e-mails a day from bogus addresses, and having the filter in place means

my

server never has to process those messages... by turning that filter

off,

every message will be imported into the e-mail database, then when the

list

server finds that the address is not valid, it will generate a bounce
message that must then be sent out. Most likely the bounce message will

be

addressed to an invalid address meaning that I'll get a bounce message

back

in return. You can see how this can put a much bigger load in the

system.

Just don't bounce invalid (non list member) email to the list. In the
event that someone legitimate tries to email the list but hasn't signed up
they're not going to be any worse off than if the message bounced (unless
you're including contact info in your bounce messages, in which case
you're going to get even more spam). Hopefully a legit person (who
hasn't subscribed) will have the common sense to email you directly or go
to your website after a few attempts at sending mail to the list.

But until shaw.ca finds a better way to deal with their spam problems

then

just turning their inbound mail servers off, I'm not sure what else to

do.

By the way, that's what's happening Jerry when your mail gets bounced

with a

550 error code... that means my mail server was not able to connect to
shaw.ca inbound servers and verify that your address is valid. I hope
you're sending copies of all the error messages to shaw too, because

it's

not my problem to fix.

You're asking Shaw to open their servers, and thus their users, to be more
vulnerable to spam (spam harvesters connect to SMTP servers and do brute
force attacks to find out a systems legitimate addressess) so that you
get less spam. You can see why they don't want to do it. What you're
asking them to do isn't even required by any RFCs.


Another way to prevent your gateway server from accepting spam is to do
xRBL and SBL lookups on each connection. Depending on your Windows mail
server, you may or may not be able to do that though. MDaemon
(www.altn.com) for Windows will do that.


Daryl




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Hee hee.........Wayne, is that what's called a generation gap?!

Lol

Dave

"Wayne G. O'Shea" wrote:

What the @#&% was that in English my son!??!

----- Original Message -----
From: "Daryl C. W. O'Shea" <dos@dostech.ca>
To: <rebel-builders@dcsol.com>
Sent: Sunday, September 12, 2004 9:42 PM
Subject: Re: Delivery failures

On Fri, 10 Sep 2004, Mike Davis wrote:

with

up a

Shaw,

can't

Whitelisting all of the list member addresses on your border relay

be just as effective as letting them through to the list and then

them. Unless you're getting a lot of spam from list member addresses,

that's another issue.

addressed

addresses.

thousand

my

off,

list

be

back

system.

Just don't bounce invalid (non list member) email to the list. In the
event that someone legitimate tries to email the list but hasn't

they're not going to be any worse off than if the message bounced

you're including contact info in your bounce messages, in which case
you're going to get even more spam). Hopefully a legit person (who
hasn't subscribed) will have the common sense to email you directly or

to your website after a few attempts at sending mail to the list.

then

do.

with a

it's

You're asking Shaw to open their servers, and thus their users, to be

vulnerable to spam (spam harvesters connect to SMTP servers and do

force attacks to find out a systems legitimate addressess) so that you
get less spam. You can see why they don't want to do it. What you're
asking them to do isn't even required by any RFCs.


Another way to prevent your gateway server from accepting spam is to

xRBL and SBL lookups on each connection. Depending on your Windows

server, you may or may not be able to do that though. MDaemon
(www.altn.com) for Windows will do that.


Daryl




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List administrator: mike.davis@dcsol.com
-----------------------------------------------------

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--
David A. Ricker
Fall River, Nova Scotia
Canada






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