Recently, Somebody Somewhere wrote these words > > This machine is always on. If it doesn't ping - something else is > wrong. It pings from here, but without alot of effort, its hard to > tell whether it's and external or internal ping.
Yep - it was an external network thing. It pinged 5 minutes afterwards. > > I followed your suggestion, and deleted these records one by one and > retested each time with SA. It wasn't until I ditched the top record - > where earthlink hands off to bellsouth - that I got a clean score from > SpamAssasin. > It took a minute (okay, an hour) to sink in. Not only was the HELO > request from my system to earthlink goofy, but apparently, so was the > request from earthlink to bellsouth. That means that every piece of > mail that I get that makes this exchange, will come back with a > FORGED_RCVD_HELO. > > This explains why, during my own tests, no matter what hostname I > asked my client to send - it wouldn't work. And it explains why I had > so much incoming mail flagged by SA. The only mail _not_ flagged, was > stuff from my earthlink mailbox that didn't come through bellsouth. > What a mess, huh? > > One more thing. I haven't tested any others, but I'm wondering now > whether "anything_I_want.mindspring.com" or > "this_computer's_hostname_only" (per Matthew), or even "localhost" > might work. Bernstein says the HELO parameter should be "a valid > principal host domain name for the client host" (see > http://cr.yp.to/smtp/helo.html - this doesn't seem exactly the same as > fqdn), or a bracketed IP address. But I guess this is more about > satisfying SpamAssassin than getting our SMTP protocol exactly right. I get the impression it's anyhostname.mindspring.com that satisfies the FORGED_RCVD_HELO, but your actual user-whetever-cable-rubbish throws another rule, HELO_DYNAMIC_HCC > > This has been fun. Thanks to you Declan, I now have almost enough > information to start my own spam intensive _almost_legitimate_ drug > company. I knew I was destined for the Big Time :-) > ROTFL! A customer of mine has a firm belief in pain making you wiser..... -- With best Regards, Declan Moriarty. -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
