On 27 Oct 2004, Genady Perchenko wrote:
> I am new to the list but I do need some help with exim.
OK, you're in the right place :)
> Network itself does not generate much email out but 99% of outgoing
> email is bounced spam.
OK, this is bad - not just for you but the poor (forged) recipients that
you're spamming! You need to stop this.
> - I am getting too much email (junk);
> - I am bouncing to much junk back, mostly to the fake
> addresses and try so hard that my server just cannot handle it.
> I decided to separate the issues, and address one at the time starting
> with taking under control outgoing email.
I *strongly* suggest that the first thing you do is to stop generating
lots of bounces. This is essential in any case, and may well solve a lot
of your problems at a stroke.
What you need to do is to work out why you are generating bounces, and
stop it. Under what circumstances are the bounces being generated? Is it
if mail is sent to an unknown recipient? In any case, you need to start
rejecting everything you don't want at SMTP time and immediately this will
mean that not only do you not have queues full of frozen bounces, but also
you won't be spamming innocent people who were unlucky enough to have
their address forged.
The odd thing is that you say you have Exim in a "mostly default"
configuration; I'm pretty sure even Exim 3 out of the box rejected bad
recipients at SMTP time. So you need to investigate your routers etc. to
find out what's going on. Do you have anything funny set up like (for
example) a system filter (possibly Nigel M's old system filter which tried
to block certain file attachments) or something?
> - The default debian installation offers exim 3. Should I conceder
> upgrade to exim 4? is any particular advantages in exim 4 for handling
> outgoing email over older version of exim.
For a machine just handling outgoing mail, I suppose you could continue to
use Exim 3. However, I would strongly recommend you upgrade because:
- Exim 3 has been obsolete for over 2.5 years,
- you will certainly want Exim 4 on your inbound machines if you're aiming
to reduce spam (because Exim 4 has a vast array of access control features
which simply don't exist in Exim 3) and
- it will probably just confuse things if some machines are running 3 and
some 4 :)
- nobody here really remembers how to use Exim 3 so you'll find support
for it is not very good.
Tim
