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Spam=bad stuff

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Mike

MIS
Aug 19, 1998
4
US
Plz bear with me, I am a little new at this. I am currently running Sendmail 8.12 on a unix machine. I have been getting a lot of spam coming through my server as of late. Soem of the headers come up with "did not use HELO protocol" and some come up with the mail to be "undisclosed-recipients". Most of this I was able to over look but now there is more and more pornography coming through and this needs to stop. If anyone can give me a little help or any ideas of how to go about curbing this it would be greatly appreciated. Is it something that needs to be done in sendmail or is there a way of password protecting telnet so they can not get into the server to send this mail. Thanks all!
 
it's a thing that neither sendmail or telnet can sort out, probably.

try looking at SpamAssassin, or MailScanner, both of these tools are supposed to work with Sendmail, and they seem to work ok. I've also found a couple of others and i'm testing them slowly, MailScanner seems to work well for me at the moment, though i do currently have it turned off because i need to get the goahead officially to use it.

other than that, sendmails site does have a large number of antispam pages.
 
I am currently using SpamAssassin on the server...which seems to be helping, but these crafty devils are still sneaking through. I have been able to replicate the spam that they are sending, by telneting into my server. Its just really aggrivating cuz my customers are starting to complain and there doesn't seem to be much I can do at this point. Thank you for the info and links jad. How do you like MailScanner so far?
 
Do you (or anyone) know of a way to set up a script that will scan email headers and dump emails with specific information in them......like "didn't use HELO protocol"? Seems like it would be an easy setup...just don't know how to go about doing it and if it would cause a huge load on the server.
 
MailScanner seems good, talks to realtime blackhole lists, amongst others, has rule sets (most/all of them sensible) and has the ability to use a virus scanner (sophos, mcaphee, others) and can dump mail at specific spamassassin levels ... it will also mark up possible spam messages with their spam rating.

seems good, it works in daemon mode. you set sendmail up so that it doesn't run the queue automatically '/lib/sendmail -bd' i.e. no queue timeout. Mailscanner grabs the mail from /var/spool/mqueue and checks if it's clean and moves it to /var/spool/mqueue.out (or something similar, you decide). it can then tell sendmail to send the queue from this location.

i have a further level of complexity because i use fetchmail, and i have a sed script that modifies the sendmail headers fixing problems with multidrop pickups, modifying the To: field and copying the files to keep a recorded backup so that users can't lose their emails by deleting their mailbox during the day :)
 
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