Spam

Suggested text for “THIS DOMAIN IS NOT USED FOR EMAIL” page. All mail for “altavista.com” and some other domains is being bounced with this message: 554 5.1.2 THIS DOMAIN IS NOT USED FOR EMAIL - ANY MAIL FROM THIS DOMAIN WAS FORGED - questions contact postmaster@av.com We still get a number of questions. I am thinking of directing users to this info on a page instead of to “postmaster@av.com”. Q: Why is email to all users at altavista.com (and other domains) bouncing back with a “THIS DOMAIN IS NOT USED FOR EMAIL message?” ...

We have a few domains that used to be used for free email, and have been closed down for quite some time (18 months in the case of altavista.com). They have been heavily abused by spammers. I was tasked with setting up two sendmail servers to catch the mail to postmaster and bounce the rest. Two alpha servers had been doing this job in the NY data center, but that facility closed down. Here are the details of how mail is set up on mail8 and mail9.

Posted for willowisp and callicrates but others might be interested too. Here is how I have spamassassin set up at work and at home… I wanted to have a system that SpamAssassin runs mostly by itself, but when it learns something wrong I want to be able to correct it. 1. .procmailrc edited for the following:

More spam blacklist fun. There is a cool tool called “SPFILTER” that automatically downloads the newest copies of several blacklists, and creates a combined output in several formats. (Bruce- maybe you can help me install this on mail8,9 Monday.. :) # mkdir /usr/local/adm/spfilter/ # cd /usr/local/adm/spfilter/ # wget “http://spfilter.sourceforge.net/spfilter-0.59/Makefile" # make all # perl -MCPAN -e shell cpan> install XML::Simple cpan> install XML::Parser cpan> exit # perl ./spfilter.pl -verbose -format=sendmail,bind SPAM RELAY

Something I am thinking about working on this month. This is probably only interesting to anti-spam advocates, sysadmins, and other hard-core geeks.