POP & SMTP Server Question

Gerry Doris gdoris at rogers.com
Wed Sep 15 07:55:12 UTC 2004


On Tue, 2004-09-14 at 10:00, Don Levey wrote:
> > Martin Alderson wrote:
> > <snip>
> >> I suggest that you do not enable SMTP connections. Every ISP should
> >> provide an SMTP relay that people can use. Enabling SMTP connections
> >> can sadly mean your server will get pounded with spammers, and there
> >> is nothing much you can do about it.
> > </snip>
> >
> 
> This is precisely *why* I set up SMTP connections.  Now I have far finer
> control on the spam I can reject.  Whenj my ISP gets it, they don't filter,
> and the spammer gets an acknowledgement that the message was received.  I
> can bounce messages, let them drop silently, complain to the ISPs involved,
> block at the firewall, whitelist, blacklist...  I get several thousand
> attempts to send me spam a day - and only one or two from the most recent
> crop are succeeding.
> 
> I use perhaps 8 blacklists, including some by geography (because I've never
> gotten a legitimate message from some areas, for example), some by dynamic
> IP, some by known spam source.  I also use spamassassin, and that's coming
> up to speed (just started).  Approx 50% (or more) of what I get via my ISP
> is spam; less than 1% via my own server.

He may have problems running his own mail server for a couple of
reasons:

- It may be against his ISP's user agreement.  My ISP is rather anal
about servers running on their network and will terminate the account if
they discover one (they scan).

- His ISP may have closed port 25 to prevent using a mail server.

Also, if you have a dynamic ip, then mail sent from your own server
(versus relaying through your ISP's server) may have problems.  Those at
the receiving end who are running SpamAssassin will likely have your
mail labeled as spam since it will be caught by the Dynablock black
list.

On the other hand you can run your own server and just pull mail from
your ISP using fetchmail.  I do this and run MailScanner with 3 virus
scanners and SpamAssassin with Razor2, DCC and Pyzor.  This combination
along with a few procmail recipes and some entries in sendmail's access
database has virtually eliminated spam for my users.  Out going mail is
relayed through my ISP's mail server to avoid the Dynablock penalties.

-- 
Gerry Doris <gdoris at rogers.com>





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