Problem with sendmail and spamhaus

[John Rudd]

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On Aug 12, 2004, at 2:04 AM, Michele Neylon:: Blacknight Solutions
wrote:

>> Would someone please teach me how to go about implementing
>> that? I really love it when I added the above lines in my
>> sendmail because my server went from average of 10.00 load to
>> 1.50 load. The extra idle could help ease up my server on serving
>> websites.
>
> If you have a load of 10 then you are either doing something wrong,
> like
> using BigEvil, or you need better hardware.
> On a typical shared hosting server with over 300 sites and close to
> 1000
> mail users we rarely see the load go above 3 during office hours.

How many messages per day?  That's much more interesting than the
number of users.

>>> I think you'd be better off using the SBL list in sendmail and
>>> scoring the XBL list in spamassassin.  I've seen a few false
>>> positives which seem to come from the  XBL list.
> It depends on your userbase to a degree, but we have seen a lot of
> issues
> with ISP dialup pools being listed in both SBL and XBL. This is not
> Spamhaus' fault, but there is no reason why the users need suffer as a
> result.
>

I don't have a problem with blocking dialup IP pools (other than my
own, of course).  Those users should be sending email through their
ISP, not directly to my front-line servers.  (for my own users, the
machines that do SMTP-AUTH are not the front-line machines, so it's not
an issue, whether they're roaming or local)

When analyzing our traffic, the SBL would really only "take the edge
off" of our peak loads, whereas the XBL really hits the spam well.
Even just doing the SBL and XBL via spam assassin, we quadrupled our
spam catching stats.  And, we haven't had any reports of false
positives via the SBL or XBL, nor have I found any.

(one thing that we do, is zone transfers from spamhaus, and then before
putting it into production we run filters on the zone files to report
any matches from our own networks, and remove them from our copies of
the zones)

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