startin, startout, stopms

[Steve Campbell]

Hugo van der Kooij wrote:
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> Steve Campbell wrote:
>   
>> Randal, Phil wrote:
>>     
>>> Steve,
>>>
>>> Are you using RBLs at the MTA level to reduce the load?
>>>
>>> Phil
>>>
>>> -- 
>>> Phil Randal
>>> Networks Engineer
>>> Herefordshire Council
>>> Hereford, UK
>>>   
>>>       
>> Phil,
>>
>> No, I'm not. I've gotten so many complaints about mail that might be
>> discarded, that I only use them in SA. It's hard to tell sales staff
>> that they can't have it both ways and to make them understand that.
>>
>> But thanks for the suggestion. If it gets too bad, I may use it.
>>     
>
> You could even considere to use a 4xx type for RBL's in the MTA. Any
> decent SMTP server will just resend the message a bit later. Or contact
> your backup server. But most direct spam senders will not retry or go to
> your backup server so it may be a good trade-off
>
> But in my experience one can not tackle this unless you kill a
> significant part of your spam at the MTA level.
>
> Hugo.
>
>
>   
Hugo,

Up until the last few days, I had not used a dnsbl, but as the problems 
I was having spread to other mail servers, and not having a convenient 
ruleset or rule in access to stop them, I finally added 
sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org to sendmail. I was amazed at the amount it caught.

I ran a MW report before adding it just to make sure it was going to be 
relatively false-positive free.

Thanks for your (and everyone else's)  suggestion and insistance on this 
thread.

Steve