Peter, > Hi, I was advised to ask the questions below here after posting on > freespamfilter org Amavisd-new forum: > > I know nothing about email systems but I have a couple of question > relating to the configuration of Amavisd-new which I would very much > appreciate the views of the forum on. > > I had my communications to a supposedly competent public authority > bounced back to me by the Amavisd-new system they had in place. I was > informed in the accompanying message that my email "could not be > delivered" and had been "discarded, sender blacklisted". > > This first came to light when I had a Freedom Of Information request > rejected in this manner. I continued to receive these messages for the > following 3 months. When the Information Commissioner finally > intervened the authority claimed that they had no knowledge of ever > receiving this particular email, until the Commissioned contacted > them, and it had been an accident as they had introduced a new email > filtering system that had resulted in my emails being rejected rather > than being redirected to a central point. > > In the intervening time although I had continued receiving the same > bounce back messages it became apparent that the authority were in > fact receiving my email as they responded to at least one. > > So what I need to know is how easily the system could be accidentally > configured to discard emails with no trace of ever receiving them, > although sending a bounce back message, and the steps required to > reconfigure the system resulting in the same bounce back message being > sent but the email being redirected to a central point within the > authority.
How easily the system could be accidentally configured to discard emails? That is a vague question and the answer is very relative. It also depends on how one defines 'discard emails' - does quarantined mail count as discarded? Does a bounce count as discarded? It is certainly possible to configure amavisd to do that. It is not a default configuration. If one sets $final_spam_destiny=D_DISCARD in the configuration file, I could hardly count it as 'by mistake', but I guess it is possible. More likely your message ended up in a quarantine and nobody cared to check logs or quarantined messages, which is not suprising, considering the amount of junk commonly received. > It also became apparent that my emails, from other email addresses, > were being scanned for keywords, ie my name, and quarantined. Possibly by some custom SpamAssassin rules. Amavisd by itself does not scan mail contents. > In a further instance the authority claim that another email of mine > sent from a different email address, although an address I had > previously used to contact the authority, was caught as spam and the > attachments, a small jpeg image file and a 53k pdf, were discarded > without trace. Is this likely to happen without specifically > configuring the system to achieve it? Amavisd does not strip attachments from mail messages. It is possible to configure it to invoke an external mail filter like altermime or some custom-made filter. Perhaps this was done at some other stage of mail delivery or storage by some unrelated software. > Would be most grateful for any views or advise as despite being > regarded as public enemy #1, due to my efforts in putting the public > authority's performance and VFM under the scrutiny their own > procedures are conveniently failing to do, I am the one in the > position of having to justify myself at a Tribunal where I am hoping > to examine these email issues a great deal closer than the authority > will find comfortable, thanks in advance. A definite answer lies in their logs and their setup. Anything else is just guessing. Mark ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The ultimate all-in-one performance toolkit: Intel(R) Parallel Studio XE: Pinpoint memory and threading errors before they happen. Find and fix more than 250 security defects in the development cycle. Locate bottlenecks in serial and parallel code that limit performance. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-dev2devfeb _______________________________________________ AMaViS-user mailing list AMaViS-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/amavis-user Please visit http://www.ijs.si/software/amavisd/ regularly For administrativa requests please send email to rainer at openantivirus dot org
