Forums & Blog

Hi

A question for the Devs from a user way down the trail...

We are a UK IT company that provides hosting for SMB market and resell for OpenHosting UK, whose servers use SmarterMail 4.3.  I have tested the anti-spam features of SmarterMail and overall they are very good if set up well in the first instance.  I have written a guide for the OpenHosting UK forum to help use these features, which you can see here: http://forums.openhosting.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=6829

There is one issue that the system has that cannot be changed by OH, because it is set within the SmarterMail setup - the message given out when you elect to "bounce" spam that has been Content Filtered states:

In a future version (not this upcoming SmarterMail 5.x major) but maybe a minor of 5.x we will be allowing customization of all responses including protocol level responses.

Tim

Tim

Thanks for that update - we'll just have to avoid the "bounce" option for the meantime.

Ian

I would like to clarify a few things on the "bounce" content filter action. The first is that that action should probably never be used in a normal usage. In fact, you can turn off the option in System Admin general settings (and I suggest you do.) The reason is that content filters are only run on mail that has already been accepted into the system. In such a case, SmarterMail is responsible for generating the NDR and sending it back to the original sender. The problem here is that if you are "bouncing" spam messages, you are going to end up sending NDRs to people whom the spammers have spoofed, and might end up getting your own server blacklisted. 

I would recommend instead getting a good list of RBLs and perform incoming spam blocking. This way you will actually reject the message during the SMTP session before they can even enter a recipient address to see if it is valid.

I am using some good RBLs for incoming blocking and its working great. Block above 90% spam and hardly any false possitve (infact I never receive any complain)

ST-JLance:

I would recommend instead getting a good list of RBLs and perform incoming spam blocking. This way you will actually reject the message during the SMTP session before they can even enter a recipient address to see if it is valid.

James

I am by no means an expert on this subject and would welcome more explanation on the last sentence of your post.  What does this mean and how can we as 2nd (reseller) & 3rd line users of a SmarterMail V4 system, deploy RBLs? Presumably our hosting company - OpenHosting UK - would have to set this up?

I take your point about "bouncing" after the mail has been received.  We were under the impression that this was a normal feature for lower level users to incorporate as it does appear in the SmarterMail help section:
http://help.smartertools.com/SmarterMail/v4/ - Section: Help for E-mail users>Settings>Content Filtering
We asked our Hosting Company Sys Admin to enable bouncing for our reseller account, which they did without any hesitation.  Perhaps this function is not understood well, even by them?  Prior to using SmarterMail's built in features, we used to use the proprietary program MailWasher Pro - this program "bounces" mail that you reject back after receipt into the POP3, so I guess this program must cause the same issue as you suggest in the first part of your post?

As a reseller using OpenHosting UK's services is there a setting their Sys Admin can open for us to enable reseller account-wide content filtering instead of deploying this by individual POP3s?

Thanks in advance for assistance and helping us understand these issues - we manage over 100 domains directly for our customers and getting to grips with the SmarterMail features like this could save us an awful lot of admin time.

Ian

I'm sorry, my answer was crafted thinking you were a system admin rather than a domain admin.

You are correct, OpenHosting UK is responsible for maintaining the spam check settings and adding/managing RBL lists as well as implementing them at the SMTP level. They may already do that.

As for bouncing, any time you "bounce" a message after it has been accepted, you may be inadvertantly spamming someone who the spammer spoofed. Now, the "bounce" action isn't bad if used to bounce legitimate mail, it's only bad when you're bouncing spam, because now your mail server is trying to send a message to either an address that doesn't exist, or to someone who never sent the email in the first place. You're just better off deleting the message. 

I know this is somewhat of an old thread, but ST, can you say whether you recommend just disabling auto responders, too? People seem to rely on these quite often, but at the same time, we're having SO much trouble with being blacklisted the last few months, that I have to wonder how much this plays into it.

To be fair, we were blocked by AOL, but got on their "sort of whitelist".
Then we were blocked by Yahoo!, but six weeks later got on their "sort of whitelist"
Then we were blocked by Hotmail and were unblocked for about a week.
Now we are blocked by Hotmail (intermittantly), SBC, AT&T and Prodigy.

All four of those system use the Symantec Brightmail antispam system. Symantec's blacklist is the ONLY one we've ever been on, to my knowledge.

This is just so frustrating...I've spent an average of 50% of my working time on blocked mail related issues and support over the last three months or so and have already lost two customers because of it.