Redundant Mail System Suggestions

[Jim Flowers]

That's because you're thinking like a decent legitimate Internet user.  If I'm
a spammer I don't bother with that.  I query for the MX record for domain.tld
and put both addresses into my handy dandy distributed spam sender (possibly
converting them to IP addresses first so that I still have them if the A
record disappears).  I don't worry about 'no stinkin' MX records after that
(takes too much time), just keep the spam pumping with my list of common or
harvested usernames @domain.tld and send 'em to both addresses via my 30,000
zombie pcs.  More than twice the chance of delivery as sometimes lower
priority servers have less spam protection.  That translates to more revenue
for me. - and twice as much spam for you to handle.

The longer a FQDN or IP address is exposed to the Internet through an MX
record the higher the probability that it will become a target for multiple
distributed spam bursts that it is very difficult to defend against. 

On the system I am currently working on, we had the servers set up for
high/low priority service until two months ago.  The spam for one domain
dropped from 5000/day to less than 500/day for the low priority server.

I agree with things not being more complicated than they need to be.  OTOH,
most of our systems run unattended so the simple solution also has to be well
thought out and executed.  There has to be a purpose behind every design decision.

----------------------------------------------------
shuttlebox <shuttlebox at gmail.com> wrote:
>I don't see anything in your setup that isn't available by two lines in DNS:

>domain.tld.             86400     IN      MX      10 mxgf1.domain.tld.
>domain.tld.             86400     IN      MX      10 mxgf2.domain.tld.


--
Jim Flowers <jflowers at ezo.net>


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