Re: Mail Blocking Improvement Request

Glenn,

Howdy:

  While I applaud the increased control over what mail our server
receives, it would be nice if we had some increased flexibility in
setting up our Mail Blocking Options.

Post.office is probably the most flexible program for blocking mail. It is way more flexible than NetTen which has always gotten praise form the press for its extensible mail filtering.

  Specifically, more info about the "From:" blocks, and the ability to
use a wildcard character ( "*" ) in the "Block mail from domains" area.

You can use the wildcard character in both the "restrict relay from" fields and the "allow relay from" fields.

  We have a particularly persistent SPAMmer who we can't seem to block
under any circumstances ( see sample headers below my signature ).  The
"From:" block doesn't seem to work, though it should have, so more info.
about, or a working "From:" block would be useful.

All of this stuff works. Remember, this blocking is all based on the envelope, not the headers. As it says: Based on envelope Mail From: Address

this is the envelope, not the From: header in the message.
You would not know what the envelope said without checking the mail logs.

 In the examples below
blocking "morgantaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" in "From:", or even
"help@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" in "Reply-to:" didn't achieve anything in pre-.b19
versions.

There is no blocking based on Reply-to: because there is no reply-to envelope item. You can Filter based on the reply-to header. this is in the filtering section.

Thus our main hope in some of these cases is to use domain blocking.

  Unfortunately, that requires the exact, fully qualified domain, and in
the example SPAM manages you can see they use a different host in every
message.  I thought about blocking by IP address, but that also seems to
vary, and I also noticed that the log showed some module being loaded and
a bunch of log entry msgs.

It does not require an exact name. Where did you see this? wildcards can be used. You should generally not need to use these options anyway.

You can block a whole network of IPs if you need to:

192.83.246.0

  Not sure how the module loading affects performance, and I need less
log entries, not more.

 The ability to specify "*domain.com" would greatly help in these
situations.

Already can. you should probably use:

*.domain.com
though.

TTS
-Eric

Thanks for your time and help in these matters.

Glenn

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