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Re: More sorbs blacklisting



On Mon, 10 Jul 2006 03:09:30 +0200, you wrote:

>Example on the above: Mail from lists.debian.org is HELO'ed with
>murphy.debian.org, here, and the connection comes from 70.103.162.31,
>which has rDNS murphy.debian.org. Had that last domain been something
>else, 70.103.162.31 wouldn't have been legitimate, in this meaning of
>the word?

I don't check what HELO says.  I check matching forward/reverse DNS of
the mail server host IP address.   Every legitimate mail server should
have matching DNS, forward and reverse.

# host 70.103.162.31
31.162.103.70.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer murphy.debian.org.

# host murphy.debian.org.
murphy.debian.org has address 70.103.162.31

... and thus murphy.debian.org passes the test.


>If so, could one not merely drop all incoming smtp-connections which
>neither originated from rDNS-legitimate addresses

Checking for a match of forward and reverse DNS is my first line of
defense.  It stops 60% - 70% of the spam hitting my server.

Everything passing the first defense has a known host name, so I can
use regex filtering to catch dsl/adsl/dynamic/whatever host names.  I
also query dynablock.njabl.org, to supplement my local filters.  That
completes my second line of defense.

For the third line of defense, I check:

  dnsbl.njabl.org
  list.dsbl.org
  sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org
  bl.spamcop.net


Anything passing the first three defenses, then goes to clamav-milter
which checks for viruses.

However, the first three lines of defense are so effective, I have no
need for content filtering of spam, and that means I keep a very cool
CPU.  :-)




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