David Legg wrote:
Hi Marc,
Well I am going to need some help from the James email server gurus.
My James 2.3.1 server, running under SuSE Linux 11.0, has definitely
been compromised and I need to get it fixed asap.
Well, I'm no guru but I can tell you that, in all probability, your
server has not been compromised - in the sense that someone has broken
in and is merrily sending stuff in your name.
A big problem with the standard SMTP protocol is that it is too
trusting. If you talk to a server and tell it the following message
is from Father Christmas then it believes you! It is very common for
spam to simply lie about the 'from' and 'reply-to' fields.
James has a number of techniques for reducing spam and trawling the
mail archive will confirm that. The trouble is there is no one
technique which will prevent all spam in a single go. As I have
mentioned before on this list I am a big fan of Bayesian Analysis.
This single bit of code on my James server only lets through about 5
spams a day out of a total of 650! Your mileage may vary.
Regards,
David Legg
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Thanks David for your reply and I hear what you are saying about
trust... But in the past James has always verified that only members of
a list server could send email to/through that list server. I have noted
a lot of attempts by spammers to impersonate me or another user, when
trying to send email to the list server but those attempts have always
failed in the past. What has changed and why should this check now be
failing. We have never had spam get into a mail list before and trust me
the users are (were) grateful! I don't mind so much the crap sent to
regular users and yes I should enable the Bayesian Analyzer on James...
I have never had the time to figure out how but now the time may be
ripe... My understanding of Bayesian filters is that they require some
sort of feedback to train them on what is junk and what is not. I can
understand how this is done in an email client but I couldn't understand
how it would be done on a server.. So I never bothered with it...
Anywise I really need to keep the %$*&! spam out of the mail lists, that
is my primary concern... So again I ask, did one of em somehow manage to
break in and exploit some sort of flaw? How should I go about preventing
it? Also I am using SMTP Auth which requires a password to send email
via the server, not simply SMTP. Are you in fact telling me to enable
the Bayesian filter and that is my only hope?
Marc...
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