Email SPAM
Everybody deals with spam. We had some minor problems with spammers hitting our email addresses with tons of garbage messages. It is interesting because recently we seem to be affected by two separate mechanisms, which it appears the same automated spam robot is initiating.
The first is that they get our IP address from various sources like the DNS system, and other sources. They then do a reverse DNS lookup to get the domain name from the IP address, in our case that is practicalecommerce.com, which they then use for the FROM header in their spam emails. This makes it look like the emails are coming from us, which can be really annoying, as well as fooling our individual spam settings for our email clients. So what is the answer to stopping this one?
In our case, since we have a dedicated virtual server with root access, I had to configure the mail server to enable "MAPS Spam Protection". I then feed the server a list of "zones" that compile lists of blacklisted spammers. I got the list off of a community forum for the server administration software, so odds are it will be different depending on your hosting setup. Anyway, this seems to have worked as most of the spam is now longer making it through. From what I understand, this prevents those reverse DNS lookup spam emails, and so far so good. Otherwise, most of this stuff is a bit over my head.
However, we still get an occasional spam message that is generated through our online forms. It seems that the robots are submitting forms now which sends us an email through our own website. These only happen so often, but I have also noticed them coming to me via other websites with forms. I think this one is interesting, and I am curious if anyone else out there has an explanation for how to combat this.
This post is filed under Developers' Corner and has the following keyword tags: dns, spam, email.
