Re: MailServer Options for Store and Forward !

[Brian Candler <B.Candler at pobox.com>]

On Thu, May 15, 2003 at 10:51:52PM +0300, Volven D'souza wrote:
> Any suggestions for Mailserver Options specifically to be used for Back-Up
> Services ! Store and Forward ! Open Source or Proprietary, any would do !

You mean simple backup MX - to just store the mail until the primary MX
comes back up again?

Any MTA should do the job. My MTA of choice is Exim, but if you prefer
something else it will be fine.

If you need more sophisticated than that (e.g. SMTP delivery to a dynamic IP
address, triggered by ATRN) then that's harder.

> Also any good tips on cutting down Spam ? Its a real menace, specially for
> us where the Bandwidth is a scarse and expensive resource.

Tricky, because even with a spam filter, the incoming message has already
been received down your incoming link so you've already paid for it - unless
you can get your mail received at a remote ISP first, then filtered, then
relayed to you.

There are certain types of spam control you can do based on the source IP
address ('realtime black lists'). They mark certain IP addresses as being
'bad' because either they are known to be sources of spam, or they run open
relays, and you can configure your MTA to refuse connections from those
addresses.

You need to be careful though, because some of these lists are over-zealous
(as has been seen here recently, one of them lists a whole Nigerian ISP
because one of its customers sent 419 scams), so you'll need to choose a
list or lists which meets your own needs. In general *all* spam filtering
techniques will lose a certain proportion of valid mail as well as spams, so
you need to choose your own balance of baby-versus-bathwater.

Regards,

BRian.

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