rbls in sendmail

Jeff A. Earickson jaearick at COLBY.EDU
Fri Apr 9 02:59:58 IST 2004


Hi,
  I use RBL+ (over two years), spamcop (quite a while), and
sbl.spamhaus.org (recent addition) in sendmail DNSBLs.  In
MailScanner, I use "Spam List = ORDB-RBL NJABL SBL+XBL".
I was using CBL in the spamlist but they had too many timeouts;
NJABL times out a lot too.

I know that Julian thinks that spamcop is trigger happy and he
does not recommend it in sendmail -- he said so in a posting back
in late December or early January.  So I turned off the spamcop
DNSBL in sendmail during January.  We got hammered by spam that
month, and users complained.  Our system load went up and not
enough got high-spam-discarded by MS to suit me (I experimented
with spamcop in the MS spam list during that time).

So spamcop returned to my DNSBL lineup in February and life returned
to normal.  I almost never get a complaint about sendmail rejecting
legit email because of the RBLs and frankly those who do complain
don't get much sympathy.  People who end up on spamcop deserve it IMHO.
I regularly report spams to spamcop, and I appreciate it when *I*
get spam complaints about my domain from them.

As for multi-level DNSBL stuff in sendmail, I did use a hack like
this in the sendmail 8.9 era.  It was a pain to maintain and had
a fair percentage of false positives.  I dropped this hack in
sendmail 8.10 and just filter on the outermost envelope, per
standard sendmail.

Jeff Earickson
Colby College

On Thu, 8 Apr 2004, Ken Anderson wrote:

> Date: Thu, 8 Apr 2004 15:35:08 -0700
> From: Ken Anderson <ka at PACIFIC.NET>
> Reply-To: MailScanner mailing list <MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
> To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> Subject: rbls in sendmail
>
> Hi All,
>
> I'm thinking of moving SBL-XBL and maybe SURBL tests to sendmail.
> Anyone running sendmail with some rblchecks via a milter that checks
> received headers too?
>
> Any recommendations?
>
> Thanks,
> Ken A
> Pacific.Net
>



More information about the MailScanner mailing list