[Mailscanner] SpamCop IP's

[Jim Levie]

On Tue, 2002-09-24 at 18:38, Matt wrote:
> Apparently Mailscanner does not look at all the IP's when doing black hole
> lookups?  I just got a piece of SPAM that was not tagged?  Looked at the
> headers and the most recent hop before my server was not listed but the one
> before that was.  Is there anyway to get Mailscanner to scan all the IP's in
> the headers except my own?
>
While it may seem attractive, it's not a good idea to check all of the
hops that a message takes, especially if you use MAPS-DUL or MAPS-RBL+.
Doing so will cause legitimate email to be rejected. As an example I
happen to use an ADSL provider that is a good net citizen and they list
the IP's of all of their non-commercial customers in the dial-up list at
MAPS. I also happen to run my own mail server and to avoid running afoul
of the MAPS list I relay all outbound mail through a mail server that
isn't on the list. If a recipient were to check all of the hops I, and
others like me, would have their mail blocked, even though I'm doing all
of the right things and for all of the right reasons.

It does make sense to check the first relaying MTA that isn't one of
your designated relays, like when you have a mail relay outside of a
firewall or when you have an upstream provider that relays all of your
mail. I use a modified MailScanner that does exactly that. It knows the
IP's of my relay systems, which will always the the last hop before the
MailScanner system, and skips those causing the ip of the hop before the
relay servers to be checked.
--
The instructions said to use Windows 98 or better, so I installed
RedHat.