Re: spammed by ICQ ???

[Maurits van de Kamp <maurits@bassment.demon.nl>]

On Tue, 10 Mar 1998, Martin-Eric Racine wrote:

>  >You're flooding yourself, the mails are received from yourself by
>  >yourself. This looks like an error in your smail config. When you 
>  >enable smtp-reception (which you apparantly have), 
>  
> Actually, I never bothered configuring SMTPD (since I use proper
> SMTP/POP clients) so I never enabled/disabled anything.  This is
> the straight KGMD package, unpacked as such and unaltered. 

I don't think so, because kgmd is delivered with the smtpd disabled.

Anyway, since you don't seem to want to receive mail, you should
DEFINITELY disable your smtpd (by commenting it out in your
/etc/inetd.conf).

>  >What goes wrong now, is that smail receives mail which was meant
>  >for you, and tries to deliver it onto the net again.
> 
> Actually, what goes on is SMTPD receives the mail and cannot find
> the user requested by the email header in the SPAM, so it tries to
> reject it but winds into an endless loop because of missing configs.

That's nonsence, because SMTPD doesn't look for that in the header, the
recipient is negociated during the opening of the connection. I receive
mail by smtp, and I receive lots of spam successfully (unfortunately),
always with an invalid email-address in the header! It all goes straight
to the right user, without any questions asked. (If anyone sends me mail
with a wrong username, an error is generated. This doesn't happen.) 

> Sorry, there's no "/etc/smail/config" file in here...

In that case no wonder your smail goes bananas. Switch it off. :)

> Thank you very much for your tuturial on SMTPD configuration basics,
> but it still doesn't justify ICQ using someone's local SMTP daemon
> to deliver SPAM...

They don't!!! How could they? You have a dynamic IP! There is no way to
find out where your smtp daemon is (what hostname), just by looking at
your email address! If that was possible, ICQ wouldn't have existed in the
first place.

Your real problem is that your incoming mail somehow ends up in a smail
queue and then the trouble starts. Which is to be expected if your smtpd
is enabled but not configured.

> IMHO, Mirabilis should be flooded with mail from
> MiNT/Unix/Linux/BSD users,

IMHO, you should check out what is going wrong a bit more before you blame
ppl and get mad at them.

Maurits.

---

Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.

          Maurits van de Kamp (maurits@bassment.demon.nl)

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