My ISP has just pointed out to me that I was running an open relay, which is highly embarrassing. I have been running postfix without causing a problem until I switched to an ADSL connection. The notes in postfix/main.cf seem to make it pretty clear what the problem is: my ISP's subnet had been added as a trusted subnet, as ADSL counts as a dialup connection, which meant that anyone on their network could relay through my mail server.

Obviously, the fault is principally mine, for not being more careful when I set ADSL up - the information is all there if you look for it. But I was wondering how many people would look for it. Because, if you setup ADSL using drakconnect, you wouldn't have a clue you needed to edit main.cf to prevent this. Would it be a good idea to either enhance drakconnect to make this change automatically (if you could figure out a sensible way to deduce the appropriate list of trusted clients), or at least flag up a warning, to stop other people making this mistake?

Cheers,

Bruno Prior


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