backscatter problem {Scanned by Allteks Mailsafe}

[Steve Freegard]

Hi Simon,

Simon Jones wrote:
> mmm, that's the problem isn't it - valid addresses!  I've seen this 
> increase a LOT this week it's nice to know i've not been the only one.
>  
> I think milter-ahead is a sendmail app isn't it?  I used to use that a 
> few years ago before switching to postfix (it's easier to administer!) I 
> played around with some of snertsoft's filters back then and they seemed 
> to work really well.

Postfix can run Sendmail milters now so I would suggest checking out 
milter-null (free) which works in a similar fashion to the watermarking 
in MailScanner but should not suffer from the same problems with the 
read-receipts. See http://www.snertsoft.com/sendmail/milter-null/

Alternatively, our BarricadeMX product written by SnertSoft and FSL has 
an advanced watermarking features and a whole bunch of other stuff that 
can nuke this stuff at the SMTP level and help reduce the load on 
MailScanner at the same time.  See http://www.snertsoft.com/smtp/smtpf/

All watermarking software will require that all your outbound mail go 
out via gateways running them otherwise valid bounces will be rejected 
in addition to the bad ones.

> I'm sure I can crack this with some sort of rule set, anyways I'll keep 
> plugging away but any comments are really appreciated.

If you haven't already, check out the VBOUNCE plug-in for SA - 
http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/VBounceRuleset as this will do 
something similar (without the watermarks) but in SA instead.

Regards,
Steve.