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@xxxxxxxxxx>
