[vexim] Dealing with backscatter

[Adam Sweet]

Tim Aslat wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm having a wonderful time dealing with approximately 1000 
> undeliverable email messages (which I didn't send) an hour for the past 
> couple of hours and I'd love to be able to just drop them into a 
> blackhole somewhere.
> 
> I'm running Vexim ( v2.2.1 ) with some custom patches to allow for 
> selective greylisting and a few other bits & bobs.
> 
> The problem is, I can't use the vbounce plugin to spamassassin, mainly 
> because I have about 50 domains on this particular server, with clients 
> sending mail from all over the place, so it's nealry impossible to add 
> all possible sender IPs to the whitelist.
> 
> Does anyone have a reasonable way to deal with this problem, other than 
> shooting all the morons who are accepting mail before rejecting it?
> 
> Something quick to set up would be really good.

There is stuff here on dealing with back scatter, or joe jobs as they
are called here:

http://www.sput.nl/software/exim.html#exim

This didn't work for me when I tried it, in 2006 I think, but I don't
recall why and in any case I probably didn't have the skills to work out
why at the time.

As a side note to other interested parties, don't go crazy with using
all of the guy's spam solutions, he is an individual with the ability to
define his personal needs quite specifically which you can't do so
easily when you're running hundreds or thousands or people's mail. I
tested a number of them and started to get almost no mail at all, even
legitimate mail. Just be thoughtful and tentative :)

Hope that points you in the right direction.

Adam