On Fri, 18 Jan 2002, Sam Michaels wrote:
> I finally got sick of all the spam, so I enabled 2 RBLs and made a custom
> system filter...works excellent. In order to try to and get myself off
> lists, I use a 'fail' in the system msg filter to bounce the spam...however,
> most of the addresses aren't valid so the bounce message itself bounces and
> gets frozen.
Indeed, this happens a lot.
We've set the directive which discards those after a certain time. In
practice if I happen to spot them before they're discarded (it depends
what else I'm busy with...), and if they're not just randomly
generated junk addresses, then I put them in our sender-reject
database so that we won't accept anything else. Then I discard them
manually, just to keep the place tidy. But if we (the postmasters, I
mean, not the 'royal we') are busy elsewhere, these timers get to act:
auto_thaw = 1d
ignore_errmsg_errors_after = 5d
timeout_frozen_after = 10d
I suspect that as the spam nuisance develops, we'll all be drifting
towards verifying the envelope sender before committing to accept an
inbound mail. Sure, in the brief interval between the time we accept
the mail and the time we try to bounce it, their ISP might have locked
them out for spamming, but at least I would expect it to considerably
reduce the nuisance.
Btw - has there been some new piece of spamware recently deployed?
We're getting a tremendous outbreak of spam with envelope senders like
nobody@www.somewhere.dom, or apache@ or www@ ditto, as if spammers
have been harvesting open web-to-mail relays and are now misusing them
with a vengeance. Is there an RBL site somewhere that's blacklisting
this kind of loophole?
