Since we have a BL discussion going, I thought I'd post my Gnatbox anti-spam wish list and see what sort of comments y'all have.
I would like to see some enhancements to the Gnatbox email proxy to support more elaborate anti-spam filtering. The current Gnatbox capabilities are are good start, but as the spam problem has gotten worse there are additional tools that would help quite a bit. (I do think this would be a marketable capability to add to the Gnatbox. People have started to build entire companies around dealing with the spam problem (Brightmail, Postini, etc.). The Borderware guys have recently announced a "Mail Firewall" that looks to do lots of stuff, but for a bunch of money.) In any event, here are the specific capabilities I'd like to see: - A local IP based whitelist. The email proxy would forward mail from any IP listed even if it appears in any of the defined block lists. This would help the case where someone that it is important to receive mail from is on one of the lists. - Expand the number of DNS block lists from 4 to 10. The current implementation of four lists looks to be an arbitrary number based on the original lists offered by MAPS. As the spam problem has gotten worse (and MAPS went subscription) a large number of targeted block lists have appeared. I'm using four lists at the moment and I would turn on a couple more right now if I could. - An option on each list to control what happens when a connecting IP is found on that list. The options would be: A) Block the connection. B) Add an "X" header indicating that the mail is from a location on the blocklist and send the mail to the recipient. C) Pass the mail, but write a log message indicating that it would have been blocked. D) Disable the list. These would allow testing of lists to see if their policies match what is desired, as well as letting the end user decide what to do about stuff that was flagged. - The ability to whitelist specific email addresses that should always *receive* mail. For example, postmaster, abuse, etc. I would suggest that this should default to the abuse@ address for all defined domains. - A local IP based block list. This would allow the local admin to block email servers that might not be on any public list, but are sending junk that we want to block. - Allow some customization of the 550 messages returned to the sender. For example, we might want to say "550 Blocked, Listed on $listname. Contact abuse@mydomain if you need to send email to us". - Change the references on the screens and log messages from "MAPS" to the more generic "DNSbl" terminology. I think this might make it more obvious that the support is not MAPS specific. I think these things would do a lot to make the Gnatbox a very capable tool to manage email coming into an organization. Comments? Joe Matuscak Rohrer Corporation 717 Seville Road Wadsworth, Ohio 44281 (330)335-1541 [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe to the digest version first unsubscribe, then e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Archive of the last 1000 messages: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]
