Filtering inbound e-mail via aliases, BEFORE Maia handles it

>On Jun 20, 2007, at 8:20 AM, Jeff The Riffer wrote:
>> See, spammers keep sending e-mail to my domain for
bogus, non-
>> existant users.
>Best practices in email:  You *MUST* reject unknown
users immediately
>with a 5xx error code at your border MX.

Yes, I'm aware of that. Unfortunately, that best practice
assumes a world that
no longer exists: one free of criminals who violate laws AND
protocols for
their own good.

We get regularly joe-jobbed, receiving e-mail for
non-existant users such as
"afkastanvaxer.net" which are bounces for
undeliverable e-mail. Rejecting
those e-mails is utterly and completely useless, a waste of
our resources AND
a waste of resources for the spammers' victims.

For those specific e-mail addresses I'd rather pretend to
silently accept them
and send it straight to the bit-bucket. That way at least
the impact of the
joe-job is minimized. As far as I can tell I've setup
Sendmail appropriately
but I'm missing something because it just skips the
aliases.

Also, this is a small site run by and for friends and
family. Everything is on
one server, I don't have the luxury of separate boxes for
border control. Wish
I did...

>I'm not familiar with sendmail, but I know it has
several mechanisms
>for doing this.

The listening MX is just acting as a blind forwarder to the
amavisd daemon
running locally. I set-up our Maia system according to
various guides I found
referenced from the Maia Mailguard site. And that's still
suffering from a
hard drive crash, poor thing. :(
If there's a better way to set-up Maia Mailguard with
Sendmail on a single
host, I'd LOVE to hear from people on it!

>I use Postfix, and there are many was to accomplish
this:

But but but... it's not sendmail! ;)

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On Tue, 26 Jun 2007, Jeff The Riffer wrote:

> >On Jun 20, 2007, at 8:20 AM, Jeff The Riffer
wrote:
> >> See, spammers keep sending e-mail to my domain
for bogus, non-
> >> existant users.
> >Best practices in email:  You *MUST* reject unknown
users immediately
> >with a 5xx error code at your border MX.
> 
> Yes, I'm aware of that. Unfortunately, that best
practice assumes a world that
> no longer exists: one free of criminals who violate
laws AND protocols for
> their own good.
> 
> We get regularly joe-jobbed, receiving e-mail for
non-existant users such as
> "afkastanvaxer.net" which are bounces for
undeliverable e-mail. Rejecting
> those e-mails is utterly and completely useless, a
waste of our resources AND
> a waste of resources for the spammers' victims.

Actually, rejecting those messages consumes far less
resources than any of 
the other options. It's even quicker than silently
discarding it, and 
orders of magnitude faster than feeding it blindly to your
poor overloaded
mailguard server.

Once you accept the message for a nonexistent user, you have
to go through 
all the work of bouncing it. Far better to simply reject it
at the smtp 
threshold and be done with it.
 

> >I use Postfix, and there are many was to accomplish
this:
> 
> But but but... it's not sendmail! ;)

No, it's a drop-in replacment for sendmail which is faster,
more secure, 
and consumes less system resources. Works for me!

Joel
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On Jun 26, 2007, at 1:43 PM, Jeff The Riffer wrote:

>
> We get regularly joe-jobbed, receiving e-mail for
non-existant  
> users such as
> "afkastanvaxer.net" which are bounces for
undeliverable e-mail.  
> Rejecting
> those e-mails is utterly and completely useless, a
waste of our  
> resources AND
> a waste of resources for the spammers' victims.

rejecting them is the shortest and quickest way to deal with
them.   
Accepting the message means the bandwidth of the message
gets used,  
and scanning resources, etc.

Saying 550 User not found  and closing the connection uses
the least  
resources possible.

David Morton
Maia Mailguard http://www.maiamailguard
.com
mortondadgrmm.net



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