RBL Support or other Spam Prevention

[G.Bloke]

I know this has already been raised a while back but it never got any response from Jag themselves which was quite disappointing

I've no faith in Spam Assassin after it failed on three seperate occassions...once bouncing all my mail for an entire fortnight while I was on holiday. Besides its not a real solution as it you have to download the spam first.

Has Jaguar at all considered a more robust anti-spam measure? Say for example RBL support? Or another smiliar but equally effective setup? Ideally it should be elective, say as a control panel option as there are some buisness owners here who I know would rather not risk rejecting customers email.

[Eric]

We haven't decided to start using anything like that yet. There are also problems with using those types of "blacklists" since it can affect the transfer of email not only for the spammer himself, but also for other users on a shared server if the spam is coming from a shared server. Spammers will spam and move on, that's their nature. More often than not, it's the legitimate mail that gets blocked, not the spam.

[Zacrifice]

there is a new service starting up that you subscribe too that on a nightly bases checks there servers and updates the list of spammers. From what i have heard its pretty damn good. give me a day and i'll find out what the site is!

[wgiese]

The problem is not with Spam Assassin, but with Jaguar's implementation of it.

It worked fine while I was hosted on Aletia servers - it wasn't until after the server moves that the mail bounce problems started. Jaguar is blaming it on a CPanel bug. I've had to open three tickets on the problem (they keep closing them, even though no resolution has been provided), and they have failed to provide me with any feedback other than "it's a CPanel problem".

We also use Spam Assassin where I work - it is an excellent package, when installed correctly.

Bill

[jkeller]

Actually you're both right (G.Bloke and wgiese).

SpamAssassin on some Aletia servers had problems and bounced everything when enabled. I think that this was a configuration thing that was fixed by the move, but it left a bad taste in the mouths of people who experienced it.

SA just recently got messed up in that you can no longer have user-specific preferences. There was a bug -- I raised it several months ago, and either Jaguar made the CPanel people aware of it or they got the info elsewhere. When a line started with "From", the message containing it was split into two parts, losing the problem line and all others after it until a double line-break.

The "fix" from the CPanel people was to change the SA filter to have the same behavior as the standard filter: insert a caret (">") in front of the word "From". Unfortunately, they also chose to use the more-efficient SA daemon instead of the application. "Unfortunate" because, while better, they didn't provide access to the MySQL tools needed to make account-specific tweaks.

[G.Bloke]

Actually I have to disagree two of the three incidents I was talking about happened whilst with Aletia.

The problem is that should Spam Assassin not be running for ANY reason, even if for just a minute exim bounces the mail. There is no safeguard so that if Spam Assassin fails to respond mail is still delivered. That is a flaw with the design of Spam Assassin. Anyway, there are other better solutions than Spam Assassin if you must download mail. For example client side progs like Mailwasher which work from Black Lists and other Spam identification methods. They will bounce and delete mail from the server. Thats more effective than simply tagging and filtering mail into the 'trash/rubbish'.

Ideally however, the best solution would bounce spam without the end user ever having to see it or download it at all.

[jkeller]

Originally posted by G.Bloke
The problem is that should Spam Assassin not be running for ANY reason, even if for just a minute exim bounces the mail. There is no safeguard so that if Spam Assassin fails to respond mail is still delivered. That is a flaw with the design of Spam Assassin.

Ah, that I hadn't known. I do know that latency is reduced a lot by the daemon version, so I'd expect that the newer -- if broken -- implementation is more reliable.

Personally, I prefer the server-side filter. I'd like the ability to move the SA-tagged messages to a different virtual mail account, but I definitely like the handling. I think we both posted about black-holing solutions before, and I'm all for that if it can be en-/disabled on a per-client (if not per mailbox) basis.

[wgiese]

While a server-based solution that drops and/or bounces SPAM would be nice, there is no solution in existence that can guarantee no false positives. Until that day arives, filtering and tagging is the only solution for me. One falsely dropped/bounced email is not a price I'm willing to pay for removal of SPAM.

As to client-side filtering, sorry - I disagree that any of them are better solutions than a good server-based filter. I check my mail from numerous locations, on numerous devices, from numerous OS's - any of which can easily drop messages tagged by SpamAssassin into a SPAM folder. I've checked out MailWasher, and it does work well - if you only check your mail from one Windows box. Yes, it can auto-delete from the server, but again - it's not 100% foolproof when it comes to false positives.

As to the SpamAssassin/Exim issue - I'm not a mail administrator, but I can also attest to the fact that I've never had a bounced email at my place of employment since SpamAssassin was installed about 6 months ago. There are obviously ways of administering it without encountering the problems I've seen at Jaguar (and others saw at Aletia.)

Bill

[G.Bloke]

wgiese - I'm not after a 100% perfect system, if it bounces a legitimate email every now and then I consider that a small price to pay. It certainly is worth it to stop the dozen or so spam email that arrive in my inbox every day. However I am aware that not everyone wants to risk an email being bounced, and hence why I said from the start that any solution should be optional on an customer by customer basis. BTW I am talking about a system that would bounce mail, not delete it, as that at least explains to the sender why their mail didn't arrive and what they can do to get off the blacklist.

I also never said that a client side option was better than server side, otherwise why would I have started this thread asking for a server side solution? What I was saying is that Spam Assassin has flaws...sure you can setup your email client to dump the spam into the 'trash' at any location but at the end of the day Spam Assassin does nothing to combat spam, its a passive solution. Thats not what I'd really like to see, server side RBL support isn't passive nor is mailwasher for example. In fact since I started using it the amount of spam being SENT to me have decreased by 2/3

I'm wary when you say you've never had any of your incoming mail bounced, because how would you know??? Besides a work environment is probably not under the sort of stress seen at a hosting company.

[wgiese]

G. Bloke,

My apologies, I assumed when you mentioned you preferred MailWasher to SpamAssassin that you were more in favor of client-side filtering.

RE the "how would I know" comment - good point and valid observation, but I'm fairly certain of what I wrote. I work side-by-side with another Systems Programmer who is responsible for our mail servers, upon which SpamAssassin is installed. At our weekly staff meetings, SPAM counts are covered. We have 1800+ email accounts, and SpamAssassin tags in excess of 50,000 emails a week on average. We have never had a report of a bounced email from any of our users. We have had numerous reports of falslely tagged messages, but this is to be expected. In any event, while this might not be on quite the scale of a typical Jaguar server, it is by no means a small installation. SpamAssassin, love it or hate it, can be made to work without the bouncing email problems experienced by me and others here.

I agree, no solution is going to be 100% satisfactory to everyone. But the only working solution currently offered by Jaguar is individual address blacklisting, something everyone here knows is next to worthless. We need SOMETHING. I'd certainly welcome ANY working server-side SPAM filtering option.

Bill

[Neva]

I think the whole SpamAssassin mess is a good reason why people trying to administer web/email servers need to actually learn how everything on those servers works. Something being 'a cpanel bug' /shouldn't/ prevent them from fixing it.

Unfortunately, they seem to have little interest in DOING anything about it. Maybe since HostGUI is due out soon--but since there are still no specifics of when, I'm not exactly sure what they expect people to do in the meantime.

[megmond]

Because I don't like any false positives either (like some others) I will refuse to rely on filtering of any kind, except my own manual filtering.

Of course the price I pay for that is that every now and then I have to filter through a few junkmails.

Fortunately I have been online long enough to have dealt with spam in the past (i.e. accounts where there were 10-20 spams or more per day, and only 1 or 2 legitimate emails). So for me the trick now is to guard my email address(es) with my life (not quite literally, but you get the point).

Also, because of the webhosting I have the 'luxury' of inventing new addresses. So I use certain addresses for forms on the web I have to fill in (where you can't avoid entering a legitimate email address, and you want the product/file/access so desperately that you don't just forget about the whole site). These can then simply be set to fail delivery if junkmail starts coming in (anyone can do this with an 'extra' hotmail account for example).

I have switched the contact email address on my website to a form so the address is not displayed anymore and can not be picked up by spambots surfing the web to gather email addresses.

I don't use 'common' addresses such as support@, marketing@, sales@ because these addresses are now being targetted by spammers without knowing if they exist (figuring they often exist or end up in catchall accounts).

Even when I have to send email to people I try to see what address I can use best.

Since some email programs automatically add addresses to the address book you will still stay vulnerable to virusses that these people have rummaging through their addressbooks, so it will not be a foolproof method, but it will at least delay the inevitable for a while.

And since you can not get off spammers lists anymore once you're on them I might still eventually have to resort to filtering (or changing the email addresses if possible). However I hope the delay introduced by being careful is enough and perhaps laws/security/decency/filtering will improve in future to solve the problem.

Like paid phonenumbers, you should be able to charge people for sending email to you... (Of course legitimate customers won't like that )

[G.Bloke]

Keeping your address private does of course reduce spam, although in my case its not practical. I need at least two of my email addressess to not only be public but visible. In fact I use a real address when posting on newsgroups and that undoubtably brings in much of the junkmail I recieve, but I use my real address because I need to make it as easy as possible for people to contact me.

Incidently, you say it isn't possible to get off spammers lists, well that isn't strictly true. Most sophisticated spammers these days will use scripts that check for bounced mail, if mail to an address bounces then that address is wiped of their system.

[Monicaj]

Heh, I just discovered SA's lovely little feature of bouncing all your email for no apparent reason. It's been bouncing for three days and I just now realized "hey, there's really a problem here" and checked it. Disabling SA fixed it, sure... but wow, that's annoying.

I don't know if there are any server-side tools that do this, but here's what I'd like to see: something that identifies spam and holds it in a special queue that doesn't get downloaded. Then, every so often (or you can do it automatically to everything, but I'd rather do it manually) you go through and tell it what to bounce. Then you can download the rest.

Of course, my favorite thing about SA has to be that it identified a response to a jaguarpc support ticket as spam...