Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Hosting Security and Technology : Combating spam mail sent from your server

[devonblzx]

Hello Everyone,

I just wanted to hear your ideas on how you avoid dealing with problems related to SPAM? I want to avoid blacklists at all possible, what are your steps for detecting and eliminating spam sent from your server? Is there a certain software out there that will detect spam being sent?

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

[cybercast]

Some practices:

1- be sure your user cannot create simple passwords like 123456. We have been subject of spam problems because of this.

2- A good proctice but not viable all the time is to restrict your user from sending emails from scripts like in php mail() function.

3- verify your clients domain name against blacklist.

4- monitor your IPs in blacklists

5- you could install a script that logs the path of the scritps used to send mail. Remember that php and perl make use of sendmail. Even if you have qmail they will use the path for sendmail to reach qmail. you could install a loggin script in between sendmail and qmail. This will helps you find a spammer in a shared IP.

6- Get a good antispam firewall. I suggest you to have a good antispam solution Hardware based in front of your servers. This will assist you to prevent incomming and outgoing spam.

7- Educate your users.

I hope this helps you.

[polarisie]

Originally Posted by devonblzx

Hello Everyone,

I just wanted to hear your ideas on how you avoid dealing with problems related to SPAM? I want to avoid blacklists at all possible, what are your steps for detecting and eliminating spam sent from your server? Is there a certain software out there that will detect spam being sent?

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

A lot of email servers nowdays come with throttling capabilities. This will allow you to limit the number of messages that can be sent out in X number of minutes/hours. This helps to a certain extent

However a lot of times, you will find that the only way you will find out that your users have been spamming is when the IP gets blacklisted. As suggested in the previous post keep an eye out on the blacklists. I remember sometime back a service that would automatically check the RDNS blacklist for your IP addresses and notify you whenever you IP gets blacklisted. You might also want to look into that (i dont remember the address of the site though)

Cheers