Hi all, some of our staff here at the University have other accounts to
which they forward their email. An example is btinternet. Lately I
noticed lots of log entries like this
2003-11-05 12:09:15 1AHMOu-0001sR-8k == arthur.gould1@???
<Arthur.Gould1@???> R=dnslookup T=remote_smtp defer (-18):
Remote host moongate.btinternet.com [194.73.73.118] closed connection in
response to end of data
I did a bit of sniffing around and discovered there were about 130 of
these in the queue and every single one was a spam. It is not the users
fault, they just want to forward their email to their btinternet
account, and any spam that gets through our filters gets forwarded.
Now it seems that btinternet are doing spam filtering at the smtp
transaction and if it identifies a spam it breaks the connection with a
defer. Is this normal? we are thinking of setting up exiscan to do this
to emails with big spam scores but we were planning to do a deny, eg a
550 permanent error. The way bt are doing it, the email sits in our
queue for 8 days and we constantly re-attempt to deliver it.
What do others do, should it be a defer or a permanent failure ?
Ron
--
Ron McKeating
Senior IT Services Specialist
Internet Services and Software Solutions
Loughborough University
01509 222329
