Re: [MiNT] Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender (fwd)

[Michael Schwingen <rincewind@discworld.dascon.de>]

On Tue, Jan 25, 2000 at 01:00:42PM +0100, Thomas Binder wrote:
> 
> Well, I'd strongly suggest the admins on your site to take this
> seriously - more and more sendmail installations use the ORBS blacklist
> to block mail from open relays (which are used by SPAMmers to disguise
> their origin and to "load balance" their mass mailings) - although ORBS

I second this. Since I was hit by that block, too, I used the opportunity
and tuned our sendmail configuration at dascon.de to do filtering based on
the RBL, RSS and DUL lists from mail-abuse.org, plus some additional spam
protection. ORBS is currently turned off since I can't yet distinguish
between single hosts and complete netblocks in the ORBS database.

Since I did that, received spam in my mailbox dropped to zero, and I see
lots of blocked attempts in the logs - and none that look like 'normal'
mails being bounced by error.

> seems to have a strange ideology, as they also put hosts on their
> blacklist which don't approve their methods.

> an open relay (or, maybe, just a host of an ISP that's not a friend of
> ORBS' methods and got "punished"), and therefore the mail was rejected
> by cs.uni-magdeburg.de

Huh? I'll have to look into that. If that is true, I will let ORBS turned
off in the future even after solving the netblock problems. Do you refer to
incidents where a server admin did *not* block the ORBS machine doing the
checks by firewalling it?

Anyway, I prefer the methods of the guys at mail-abuse.org, but I do think
the ORBS list is a valid method as long as inclusion rules are clear and
coherent.

cu
Michael
-- 
Michael Schwingen, Ahornstrasse 36, 52074 Aachen