Nathan Harris wrote:
> About two weeks ago, our server's spam load suddenly increased four 
> times.  I am filtering all email through spamd and clamd.

Content filtering of course only happens after the message has been
received. IMHO, anti-spam should happen before.

> In the past, 
> this was fine.  However, I need to do something to decrease the load at 
> the front end and reject some of this junk.

Spam has been a topic at Athens 2006. See their page
Element IV - Anti-Spam Technologies
http://www.oecd-antispam.org/article.php3?id_article=241

> I have not setup SPF

Apparently, there is no sign to recover from MARID failure in the SPF
standardization process. As a consequence, the number of sites that
implement SPF is low. I'd recommend to implement SPF, but don't expect
to significantly reduce your load with that. Blacklists (spamhaus and/or
trendmicro) stop nearly 50%. SPF stops an insignificant fraction of it.

> Can anyone recommend a "safe" SPF configuration?  Or other suggestions 
> on setting up greylisting or such (a HowTo or such would be helpful).

Setting up SPF consists of 3 steps:

1) Check your .courier or .mailfilter forwards, any fetchmail-like pumping,
etcetera, and make sure you set a proper sender for bounces. Normally, you
just want to stop forwarding if a bounce shows there's no one to forward to.
Thus, delete the forwarding instruction by the same means that you used to
insert it, triggered by bounces. Otherwise, e.g. for bulk vanity addresses,
use SRS to automatically redirect bounces to the original sender.

2) Configure Courier. The following in bofh is safe:
opt BOFHSPFHELO=pass,none,neutral,softfail,unknown,error,fail
opt BOFHSPFMAILFROM=pass,none,neutral,softfail,unknown,error
opt BOFHSPFFROM=mailfromok,pass,none,neutral,softfail,unknown,error
opt BOFHSPFTRUSTME=1

3) Publish your spf records. My suggestion is to take advantage of the
cidr format to set as many neutral addresses as it's cool (e.g. all ARIN's
blocks), but then terminate your domain record with `-all'. You should also
add a record for each ip address, since it can be used on the right side of
a '@' to form an e-mail address, or as a helo host. You may generate that
like so:

perl -n -e 'if (m/^\s*([-a-z0-9.]+)\s+(IN\s+)?A\s+([0-9]{1,3}\.?){4}\s*/)
   {printf "%-26sIN TXT \"v=spf1 a -all\"\n", $1;}' /your/zone/file


Step numbering is not necessarily the order that you have to do them.
E.g. step (1) is required if an original sender's domain has done step (3)
_and_ the forwarded-to domain has done step (2).


Links:
http://www.openspf.org/
http://postmaster.aol.com/spf/


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