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Email filtering, spam, and other random notes on SMTP.

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Email filtering, spam, and other random notes on SMTP.

Monday, 30 May 2005 20:47

It is amazing to me how complex SMTP can be at times. Simple mail gets complicated due to the unending arms race between the spammers and the users.

Mail server prerequisites

Make sure that the IP of your server resolves back to your domain name. If you don't then most mail servers will flag your mail as spam. This is something I always forget when setting up a new server...
So you should be able to do an nslookup yourname.com and get an IP, then take that IP and do an nslookup IP. You should get your name back.

SPF - Sender Policy Framework

SPF: Introduction
The SPF Setup Wizard - helps you build SPF txt records.

Qmail

Lately I setup a Qmail server using CentOS: I used the following directions and I was very pleased. (btw: qmail-showctl is a nice program to view settings for qmail.)
qmail: Second most popular MTA on the Internet
POP-Toaster using Qmail, Vmailmgr, Courier, and Squirrelmail
VMailMgr
QMRTG - a qmail activity analyzer
Chris Hardie - qmail Anti-Spam HOWTO
SourceForge.net: qmHandle - a tool for the qmail queue
DomainKeys with qmail Howto
qmail SPF (Sender Policy Framework) patch

Postfix

Virtual Users And Domains With Postfix, Courier And MySQL (Fedora 8) | HowtoForge - Linux Howtos and Tutorials
OpenSourceHowTo.org - MySQL users, PostfixAdmin, Postfix, Dovecot & SquirrelMail with userprefs stored in mySQL
Johnny Chadda .se : Mail server HOWTO - Postfix and Dovecot with MySQL and TLS/SSL, Postgrey and DSPAM
Howto:Postfix - Fedora Directory Server
Postfix Wiki
Postfix Backscatter Howto
Postfix Admin - Web based administration interface
Postfix MySQL Howto
Labcoding » Blog Archive » Installing a Postfix mailserver on CentOS 5

SPAM filtering

SPAM. SPAM. SPAM. Why do you fill my inbox so? Emails without valuable payload. The words have no meaning for you or me. Only to serve as an annoyance for the economical gain of another. The spammers are an intelligent bunch. They know about filtering too. So there is a constant game of cat and mouse. One day it will all go away and I will think of you no more.