Additional Spam Countermeasures?

mjm

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Mar 21, 2005
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San Diego
Several of our users are receiving a very large amount of spam, we are running Spamblocker 4.2.3 with Spamassassin 3.4 using the sought & spamassassin rulesets. These haven't impacted what we are receiving by much.

Is there anything else we can do to slow the spammers down?

Thanks.
 
Not really besides paying for 3rd party spam filtering or buying a spam filter appliance like a barracuda spam filter.
 
Yes, use_rbl_domains is a symlink to domains on all of our systems.
Have you enabled all the blocklists, including my optional ones? Unfortunately the best ones may incur a cost or have restrictions on their use.

Jeff
 
Not really besides paying for 3rd party spam filtering or buying a spam filter appliance like a barracuda spam filter.
My version of SpamBlocker 4 (and maybe DirectAdmin's as well; I'm not usre) offer the Barracuda blocklist.

Jeff
 
I'm testing in the last month the EFA project, and i must say, it does work pretty good and give end-user the ability to set an email as spam with a link that add the sender-receiver combiantion in an internal blacklist:

Check this: https://efa-project.org/

I'd tested it with two of mine domains, and i feel pretty happy with that at point that i'm gonna start soon an implementation script (since everydomain added to DA for now have to be added manually to EFA Server) to use API (if they exist) on EFA Server side.

Best regards
 
Some time ago I've created a set of scripts to bind Directadmin server with Mailcleaner: http://www.mailcleaner.org/
I can't share the scripts, they were written by me within a commerce service. Anyway if you might want to try Mailcleaner I could help you as well and write some for you.
 
Hi Alex,

thanks for the link.

Does this work as forwarding server or it "pretend" to store mail locally? EFA does receive email, inspect them, and forward them to a definied server, does mailcleaner do the same? I did read some info's on their website but wasnt that clear.

In any case i'm gonna test it today probably :)

Best regards
 
I don't remember all the details and I'm not quite sure now how mailcleaner is working. It was an year or so ago. And all what I had to do was a set of scripts to be executed on directadmin server to automatically manage domains/accounts on a Mailcleaner server. As an example when a new domain is added into directadmin we need that domain to be added on the Mailcleaner server. And so on.

Here what I've found on the site:

MailCleaner must be installed between the Internet and your final mail server, either by becoming the new MX record for your domain(s) or by getting mail from your frontend gateways. Once filtered, the messages will be forwarded to your destination mail server(s) or next gateway(s).

http://www.mailcleaner.org/doku.php/mailcleaner:description

So directadmin server is supposed to store all the emails.
 
Oh ok, missed that line :)

Ok so, it does work exactly as EFA Server. The only doubt i have now is that last release is dated 2012 while EFA-Project is actually live (and i use it on CentOS instead of Debian as for mailcleaner, but that's not actually a problem).

Also, another difference is that mail cleaner use exim as MTA while EFA does use postfix, but, is not a problem aswell.

EFA need to have domain created with relative end-server-ip/host set for each domain, so, that would be the only call done via domain_create_post.sh i suppose, have no need to create a set for each email address since the DA server will receive mail for non-valid addresses aswell and reply by itself for this.

I'll check if mailcleaner need email account to be set, but i suppose not :)

So, so far, the only "issue" is the release data which is kinda old... so maybe EFA have most up2date software and community is probably more active.

Thanks
 
have no need to create a set for each email address since the DA server will receive mail for non-valid addresses aswell and reply by itself for this.

Well there were done an interface in Directadmin to list what domains are created in Mailcleaner, then there was a page to enable/disable a domain to use mailcleaner. And some others. To use mailcleaner you might need only one script depending on your needs of course.
 
Thanks smtalk, but actually spamexperts.com host your mail appliance, while efa and mailcleaner is a "your side" server without need to pay for a service and/or put your mail server elsewhere. :)

Thanks for the hint in any case :)

I'll check the exim HowTo's soon.

Regards
 
I'm very interested in the recent discussion above between Alex and Andrea, but the key question for either one is:

Is it better than running SpamBlocker?

Because it blocks more spam?

Also, I noticed some statement about one (perhaps both) being able to whitelist receiver-sender pair addresses. Will either do the same for blacklisting receiver-sender pairs?

And can either be run on the same server? Or would either require a separate server?

Thanks.

Jeff
 
Hi Jeff,

yes it does block more spam (lot more) and every email has a signature with a link to add the sender to blacklist, and that blacklist is a single sender-receiver line.

Regarding the whitelist the admin can add a single sender-receiver whitelist, while, if a message get blocked the first time, the system send to the end-user an email sayint that an email from "sender" has been blocked with a link to unblock it (and so it add to whitelist); if the user ignore/delete that email, the system will never notify anymore the user about same sender that has been blocked.

Regaring the install on same server i'm not too sure, since some work probably have to be done for prevent port conflict for mail and web (since it does have a web interface which work on 443 and mail server which work on 25).

FYI it does use mailscanner which seems to be pretty useful and i would love to see it integrated into DA server and exim.

But for sure, i can do some test for run EFA on DA Server as soon as i do have some free time :)

Regards

Best regards
 
Thanks, Andrea.

I suppose we could run a separate server, but lots of smaller hosting companies likely can't afford to do that.

If we do run another server, then how is email transferred to our main server? Is it strictly a matter of mx priority, or do we need to use a different email port on our own DirectAdmin server?

Thanks.

Jeff
 
Andrea,

I thought I'd add this in another post to the thread:

I'm considering offering an Enterprise Email solution which would either use Horde Webmail or AfterLogic webmail. It would not run DirectAdmin and would not allow webhosting, but would likely use exim. If we move forward with this we'd need of course webmail and the EFA solution, so we might need to somehow proxy the web needs of both; both will need secure https access on the standard port 443.

Jeff
 
It is just a matter of MX priority.

On the EFA server the only setup would be add the domains in this way:

domain.tld final-server-ip

Also, why you dont think on roundcube as webmail? Does the other have really something better?

Regards
 
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