Scribblings

Mail policy

In the past few weeks I’ve been receiving much more spam than I used to on most of the mail servers which I use. I guess a new botnet has come online or something.

For the past two or three years I’ve had the dawnsun.net mail server set up to use Spamhaus’s list of known spam addresses to decide whether to accept incoming mail or not. I’ve not rejected mail solely because it was coming from a dynamic IP address largely because I’m an old traditionalist: there are quite legitimate reasons for wanting to run your own mail server.

I’ve now backtracked on this, at least for the moment, because so much of the spam which was getting through was coming through direct connections from dynamic IPs. Making the change immediately cut down the amount of spam coming in to a small trickle. I just wish I could make this change to the other servers I use but unfortunately I don’t have the same level of control over them as I have over the VPS on which dawnsun.net lives.

It works but I don’t like it. Apart from anything else I can no longer send mail out through my own mail server.

If you’ve had problems sending me mail then my new policy is probably the reason and you’ll have to resort to using your ISP’s outgoing server. My apologies.

Posted 5 May 2009, 07:10
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