Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>]

on Tue, Apr 06, 2004 at 01:18:15AM -0400, Tanner Lovelace wrote:
> Steven Champeon said the following on 4/6/04 1:05 AM:
> 
> >We've been under attack by accept-then-bounce servers for weeks now; to
> >the tune of 25K+ bounces so far, from 8200+ different servers. It's not 
> >fun.
> 
> Ouch!!  I feel your pain.

It's actually been fairly painless; I set up a catchall alias for all of
the forged mail a while ago. But a little log analysis shows that we've
hit a milestone of over 93% of inbound traffic as spam, viruses, or accept-
then-bounce "backscatter" on the server that's getting hit.

And, well, I'd like to see a day where more than 7% of my inbound mail
traffic was *legitimate email*.
 
> >Please, if you're running qmail, go kill yourself. But before you do,
> >please find someone who can uninstall qmail from your server after you die.
> 
> What is it about qmail that gives you so many problems?  I used qmail
> for several years but switched to postfix because I got fed up with
> the program trying to dictate system policy (e.g. where files should
> go).

qmail has a tiny daemon that accepts mail.

And then it hands it off to another tiny process that bounces a DSN back
to the sender if it can't deliver it.

Even if the sender is completely, irredeemably, utterly, bogus, and
never existed anywhere. Ever.

It's pretty funny, really, how much of the mail I've gotten since I took
the catchall out and replaced it with a custom ruleset is from qmail.

Not.

Basically, qmail is like the easily audited SMTP drop-in sendmail
replacement equivalent of the "Saddam was behind 9/11" argument. 

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