MailScanner maillog error

[Rose, Bobby]

I've been using this function for a very long time without much complaint.  It's nt any different than mail admins runing systems that act as open relays and are rejected.    There are certain SMTP rules that should be obeyed and if they're not then it's up those sysadmin to learn and fix in order to commuicate unimpeded with the rest of us.  Of course, if you're blocking anything from the sendmail side, it's a good idea to also use the delay checks feature and add spam:postmaster and spam:abuse lines to your access file so that if there is an issue with someone they can at least email those accounts and not be blocked. Only problem is that if they don't know about setting their mail system up properly then they probably don't know to send a message to postmaster.  

-----Original Message-----
From: Mariano Absatz [mailto:mailscanner at LISTS.COM.AR] 
Sent: Friday, March 07, 2003 11:28 AM
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: MailScanner maillog error


hint: 
if the line says 
Month day time host sendmail[pid]: ...
then the message was generated by sendmail.
Month day time host Mailscanner[pid]: ...
then the message was generated by MailScanner.

Now, this message is sendmail's, and this means that it couldn't resolve a 
reverse DNS lookup (get host by address) on those addresses. 

Probably, you got connections from those and sendmail tries to resolve them. 
I just tried to resolve them from my dns cache resolver and none of them have 
reverse entries... this is not an error condition, per se... 

It is considered "bad manners" (or incompentce depending on who you ask) not 
to have a reverse dns record for a mail server, and one of the first anti- spam measures was to deny smtp connections from hosts without a reverse (or 
worse still, those with a reverse that didn't match any A or CNAME for the 
same host).

But as more and more incompetent sysadmins are out there, those kind of 
measures rejected too much legit mail to keep them up...

El 7 Mar 2003 a las 14:11, John Thewlis escribió:

> Hi
> 
> Many thanks for all the help on the /etc/sasldb error, it is now 
> fixed.
> 
> When looking through the MailScanner maillog, I get the following 
> error message each time an email is sent through the server:-
> 
> 
> Mar  7 14:05:46 ns MailScanner[18807]: New Batch: Scanning 1 messages, 
> 3034 bytes Mar  7 14:05:46 ns MailScanner[18807]: Virus and Content 
> Scanning: Starting Mar  7 14:05:46 ns MailScanner[18807]: Uninfected: 
> Delivered 1 messages Mar  7 14:05:46 ns sendmail[29908]: 
> gethostbyaddr(217.114.166.33) failed: 1 Mar  7 14:05:46 ns 
> sendmail[29908]: gethostbyaddr(217.114.166.34) failed: 1 Mar  7 
> 14:05:46 ns sendmail[29908]: gethostbyaddr(217.114.166.31) failed: 1 
> Mar  7 14:05:46 ns sendmail[29908]: gethostbyaddr(217.114.166.91) 
> failed: 1
> 
> 
> Any ideas as to how to resolve this error?
> 
> Thanks
> 
> John


--
Mariano Absatz
El Baby
----------------------------------------------------------
"Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen."
               -- Edward V. Berard, "Life-Cycle Approaches"