Mark,
Thanks for your comments. They have certainly been the most help so far. I
have been doing some research on the SPAM dilemma over the past couple of
weeks (mostly from the qmail homepage under the Spam prevention section) and
find your remarks to be right on target. I am currently using rblsmtpd to at
least try to combat known SPAMers, but it certainly is not 100% effective
for the reasons you point out below. I have also noticed that I am receiving
quite a bit of SPAM from the same source. So, my goal would be to find a way
to block that host from sending me any more mail. I do realize that I would
be blocking all other users that use that host as their mail server. At the
moment I am using this server as a personal mail server so I am OK with
that. I also realize that the SPAMer could just switch to a different relay
box to send their mail. On this issue only time will tell.
I hope this explains what I am trying to accomplish. If there is a way to do
this with qmail that would be great. Otherwise I guess I could try to use
hosts.deny and see if that works.
Any suggestions are appreciated.
Aaron
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Saturday, October 14, 2000 9:02 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Bogus MAIL FROM (SPAM)
On Sat, Oct 14, 2000 at 08:33:54PM -0400, Aaron Newcomb wrote:
> So, are you saying there is no way to block certain hosts in qmail? I find
He might not have been saying it well, but blocking spam is a hard problem.
If you're relatively new to the issue of spammers and how they quickly morph
to avoid spam blocks, you might want to do a bit of research.
> that hard to believe. Qmail has been a pretty good package so far, and I
> can't believe that would be so limited in this area.
It's limited because spam blocking has two severe problems. First there is
no guaranteed way to identify all spam. Second spam filters give you false
negatives. That is, you can accidentally block real mail because your spam
filters are too aggressive.
Perhaps for those reasons, qmail decided to largely stay out of the spam
blocking game and leave it to others.
qmail gives you two methods for blocking spam. badmailfrom if you can
identify the
envelope sender of the spammer and tcpserver if you can identify the ip
address
of the spammer.
So, to return to your question, what do you mean by "block certain hosts"?
Do
you mean their IP address, do you mean their name in the envelope, or do you
mean their name in the mail (such as From:)? Note that a good spammer will
change all of these more quickly than you can eat breakfast...
> point. Lastly, I am not sure what comment you are trying to make about my
> MCSE certification, but I am proud of the training I have had on all the
> operating systems I work with whether they be MS, UX, Linux or otherwise.
He's being facetious. Ignore it. If you're willing to learn, you're more
than
welcome on this list.
Regards.
