It doesn’t sound like you are being repeatedly hacked. It sounds like your 
reputation dropped with google, and certain emails trigger their anti-spam 
filtering now. Not all of them, just some. I have problems with Google 
accepting email regularly sometimes, and dropping other emails into people’s 
spam folders, as a result of too many of my users forwarding email to google 
and those forwards passing along a lot of spam to their addresses on my server. 

-Sent from my Pip-Boy 3000

> On 17/08/2020, at 8:46 AM, Charles Hockenbarger <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> 
> As I understand the forwards setup in qmailadmin those are in the database, 
> right?
> 
> The address that was compromised hasn't sent any email since the password 
> change. 
> 
> I hadn't thought about looking at qmail-inject. I'll dig into watching that 
> part of the process. 
> 
> Get TypeApp for Android
>> On Aug 16, 2020, at 3:14 PM, Eric Broch <[email protected]> wrote:
>> How do you have your forwards set up?
>> 
>> Is there any mail in your queue?
>> 
>> If someone hacked an account on your server with forwards to gmail accounts 
>> they aren't limited to just these forwards, they also have the option in the 
>> email client to add gmail accounts in the "To:" field of the email they're 
>> sending, thus bounces from gmail accounts that aren't in your forwards file.
>> 
>> Also, qmail-inject puts mail in the queue and you'll see it in the send log.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> On 8/16/2020 10:05 AM, Chas Hockenbarger wrote: 
>>> I'm hoping someone has encountered this weird behavior or something like it 
>>> before and can point me down a path, because all my research has turned up 
>>> nothing so far.
>>>  
>>> 
>>> I had an email account recently get breached due to a re-used password, and 
>>> that account was used to send a bunch of spam out from a server I help 
>>> manage.  We changed the password on the account as soon as we found it 
>>> happening and the outbound flood stopped.
>>>  
>>> 
>>> Shortly after that, however, I started seeing a very, very strange 
>>> behavior.  Sometimes, and I haven’t yet been able to identify the trigger 
>>> or pattern, when users on this server send email to a forward that contains 
>>> around 50 or so email addresses (they use it like a private distribution 
>>> list) they will get anywhere from 1-10 bounces from Gmail.  Not every email 
>>> sent to the forward has this happen, and not even every email from a 
>>> particular user.
>>>  
>>> 
>>> The outbound spamming caused the server’s reputation to go in the tank with 
>>> Google, and if it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t know this was happening, 
>>> because they get the bounces from Gmail accounts that absolutely ARE NOT in 
>>> the forward or part of the email chain AT ALL.
>>>  
>>> 
>>> I’m kind of freaking out here because while I haven’t found a breach of the 
>>> actual server / OS, this feels like someone has been able to inject 
>>> something somewhere into my server that I simply can’t find.  It is 
>>> especially troubling because a user who is not on this domain, but is part 
>>> of the group and therefore uses the forward from time to time, sent 
>>> something to the forward today and got Gmail bounces.   
>>>  
>>> 
>>> I don’t see anything in the send log that shows the server even trying to 
>>> send to Gmail, which only adds to the ghost story.
>>>  
>>> 
>>> Any ideas, paths to go down, anything would be greatly appreciated here.  
>>> I’m about to just rebuild the whole thing from scratch on a new VM, but if 
>>> I’m overlooking something simple don’t want to put the users through that.
>>>  
>>> 
>>> Thanks in advance.
>>>  
>>> 
>>> Chas

Reply via email to