Spam, Spammers and Blocklists, oh my!

09:50.34 - Tuesday 5th December 2006   (Link to This Entry)

I'm getting heartily sick of the whole email/spam/rbl situation at the moment.

Our office IP was blocked because we sent out a mass email on behalf of a customer, and it's proving a pain in the arse to get it off the block lists. Not only does it take weeks, but customers are apparently using RBLs that - according to DNSStuff at least - should not be used.

AOL decided to block email from our server because we had an unsecure script on there at some point in the past. Rather than TELL us, the just blocked us and left it at that. Thanks, AOL! I'm now jumping through their hoops to try and get the ban lifted so that our clients can receive email directly (some of them insist on having their email forwarded to AOL, sigh...) rather than having me forward the bounces.

Customers don't seem to appreciate how much spam/virus crap we're dealing with these days. With SpamAssassin and MailScanner both running on the server I still receive around 30 a day that are slipping through. We have our spam filter level set at the default of 6 points and it catches the occasional legit email, so I dare not set it any lower.

And just today I had some stupid script kiddy hacker crap to put up with. Some pillock over at 222.121.133.34 (a Kornet IP) decided to script scan the server for default passwords, over and over again, from the same IP. Thanks, Korea! Jesus. I've sent them an email but I'm not holding out much hope.

It is time to go home yet?