Ah, the joys of network administration...

wbarnhill said:
Yeah, my boss had been trying to keep things as open as possible, but after this incident, we're moving from IMAP to POP and limiting everything to 1MB, no attachments other than PDF or DOC/TXT.
Click to expand...

How does IMAP have any bearing on the problem? I would suspect that IMAP would lower your network traffic.

I was about to commit to IMAP for my personal use. POP is worthless when you leave 8000 messages in your inbox and want use multiple clients on 3 platforms to check mail, especially when the web client wants to use LAST which is depreciated.
 
I really don't get much spam. On my personal website I created a PHP form to contact me (it e-mails me). This is all handled server-side so my e-mail address is never actually known.

I have a gmail address that I use when I signup for things (if I dont trust hte company)..

I also run all my e-mail through an opensource spam solution called SpamAssassin, which as far as I am concerned, is as good as any commercial package at no cost. http://spamassassin.apache.org/

So basically my mail system is setup like so:

SMTP server = Qmail. Qmail sends the e-mail through SpamAssassin which then puts it in the appropriate maildir for the user. If it thinks it is spam it simpy flags the subject as ***SPAM***. I prefer it this way so I don't lose an e-mail.

Imap server: Cyrus. I prefer IMAP over POP for several reasons. First off it keeps all messages on the server. So if I am checking my e-mail at home via an e-mail client (mozilla thunderbird) it is the same as my webmail.

Webmail: Horde/IMP. Open-source PHP webmail solution. It is driven by the IMAP server. So once again, it doesn't matter how I check my mail I have hte same folders..etc

Sort of similar to an Exchange setup...but free.

This is all Linux of course.
mikea said:
How does IMAP have any bearing on the problem? I would suspect that IMAP would lower your network traffic.

I was about to commit to IMAP for my personal use. POP is worthless when you leave 8000 messages in your inbox and want use multiple clients on 3 platforms to check mail, especially when the web client wants to use LAST which is depreciated.
Click to expand...
IMAP is god. If you do encourage your users to use IMAP though you must except the responsibility of keeping their e-mails backed up, since it is stored server side. RAID + Offsite backups would be the most desired.
 
Ah, yes, spam. Hate it, stuck with it for now. Can't afford Barracuda.

I was checking all mail coming into the server against a couple of well-known blacklists, plus a limited internal blacklist of the "really bad" guys (folks that sent spam to "Postmaster" or "Root".

Since I'm looking for a job, I can ill afford to bounce a false-positive back to the sender. So the hard-code list has been changed to include a reference to my gmail account (spelled out so the auto-spammers will tend to not get it), and I pulled the blacklists out of the filtering.

I'm really tempted to put the most conservative blacklist (spamhaus) back in, though I am checking the daily email against that list to see what positives I might expect.

Die, spammers, die.
 
jangell said:
http://spamassassin.apache.org/
Click to expand...

I eliminated about 50% of the incoming spam without affecting most legitimate mail by setting up a lower-priority MX mail server - and installing a blacklist check (against Spamhaus) on it. It seems many of the spammers automatically send their cr^p to the lower priority mail host, instead of the primary, and most legitimate mailers start with the highest priority and work down. Spammers figure that most admins have looser filters on the low priority hosts, I've done the opposite.

We'll see how long it lasts.
 
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