[Techtalk] opinions on RBLs, please

[Rasjid Wilcox]

On Tue, 18 Feb 2003 7:28 am, Carla Schroder wrote:
> In my never-ending quest for good spam-fighting tools, I've been pondering
> using RBLs. However I'm concerned about blocking legitimate emails, they
> seem rather cavalier about the possibility. "If your ISP is a spammer, get
> a different ISP." Anyone have experience with them? There won't be any
> relaying issues for my clients, no downstream servers, just how will their
> own mail delivery be affected.

I'm in the process of writing a plugin for qpsmtpd (a qmail-smtpd replacement) 
that does full mysql logging and then reports to users what mail was 
rejected, (giving who it was from, its subject etc) so they can report 
legitimate mail that has been blocked.

qpsmtpd is written in perl, and is extremely easy to tailor to anyones 
specific requirements.  (It is pretty easy to set up your own whitelists, 
blacklists or whatever you want really).  It currently only works 'out of the 
box' with qmail, but it could be made to work with other mail servers by 
anyone who knows some perl and how their mailserver works.  It is just a 
matter of writing a replacement pluggin to inject mail into the mail queue.

I mainly started using it because it can be set up to reject invalid users at 
the smtp level, rather than creating bounce messages that often get 
double-bounced back to postmaster.  This way, don't pay for mail I'm going to 
reject anyway.

Cheers,

Rasjid.

-- 
Rasjid Wilcox
Canberra, Australia (UTC +11 hrs)
http://www.openminddev.net