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Entries tagged smtp

If there isn't a movie about it, it's not worth knowing, is it?

26 November 2008 21:50

So, I've just got a portable machine. I've configured it to be a pretty minimal installation of Debian Lenny, but one thing that makes me unhappy is mail handling.

By default it came with several exim4- packages. Now in general Exim4 rocks. But it is a deamon running all the time, and overhead I could live without.

I looked around to find a mail transport agent that would be more suited to the machine and was suprised to find nothing suitable.

Basically I figure the machine will never generate "real" emails. Instead it will only receive mails from cron, etc. The machine will never have a real fixed IP, and so relaying mail externally is a waste of time. The mail should just go somewhere predictable and local.

There are a couple of lightweight agents which will forward to another system, but nothing seems to exist which will queue mail locally only.

So I've hacked a simple script which will do the job.

Given the spool director /var/spool/skxmail the following command:

skxmail root < /etc/passwd

Produces this:

/var/spool/skxmail/
`-- root
    |-- cur
    |-- new
    |   `-- 1227702470.P8218M243303Q22.vain.my.flat
    `-- tmp

4 directories, 1 file

That seems to be sufficient for my needs. (I support the flag which says "read the receipient from the body).

Of course to do this properly I'd be setgid(mailgroup). Instead I assume that local means everybody can see it and /var/spool/skxmail is mode 777. Ooops.

Still happy to share if it sounds interesting.

ObFilm: Dogma

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Some domains just don't learn

5 February 2012 21:50

For the past few years the anti-spam system I run has been based on a simplified version of something I previously ran commercially.

Although the code is similar in intent there were both explicit feature removals, and simplifications made.

Last month I re-implimented domain-blacklisting - because a single company keeps ignoring requests to remove me.

So LinkedIn.com if you're reading this:

  • I've never had an account on your servers.
  • I find your junk mail annoying.
  • I suspect I'll join your site/service when hell freezes over.

I've also implemented TLD-blacklisting which has been useful.

TLD-blacklisting in my world is not about blocking mail from foo@bar.ph (whether in the envelope sender, or the from: header), instead it is about matching the reverse DNS of the connecting client.

If I recieve a connection from 1.2.3.4 and the reverse DNS of that IP address matches, say, /\.sa$/i then I default to denying it.

My real list is longer, and handled via files:

steve@steve:~$ ls /srv/_global_/blacklisted/tld/ -C
ar  br  cn  eg  hr  in  kr  lv  mn  np  ph  ro  sg  tg  ua  ve  zw
aw  cc  cy  gm  hu  is  kz  ma  my  nu  pk  rs  sk  th  ug  vn
be  ch  cz  gr  id  it  lk  md  mz  nz  pl  ru  su  tr  uy  ws
bg  cl  ec  hk  il  ke  lt  mk  no  om  pt  sa  sy  tw  uz  za

On average I'm rejecting about 2500 messagse a day at SMTP-time, and 30 messages, or so, hit my SPAM folder after being filtered with CRM114 after being accepted for delivery. (They are largely from @hotmail and @yahoo, along with random compromised machines. The amount of times I see a single mail from a host with RDNS mysql.example.org is staggering.).

(Still looking forward to the development of Haraka, a node.js version of qpsmtpd.)

ObQuote: "Mr. Mystery Guest? Are you still there? " - Die Hard

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