Posts filed under 'Email'
Someone must have known that I had a busy two weeks planned when some spammer decided to aim their zombie farm at my domain last Thursday and again Monday. At first I thought everyone was getting more spam (attempts… none made it through my filters) , then I realized that it was almost entirely aimed at dostech.ca addresses. Better yet, it was all aimed at addresses that don’t exist… specifically harvested message IDs. Really, who’s the dumbass out there that’s been spamming the hell out of message IDs, harvested from posts I’ve made to mailing lists, for about 9 months now. You’re wasting your time and resources and making it easier to catch the few spams you send to my legitimate addresses.
Anyway, Thursday’s mail volume was up over 4 times my average mail volume (which is high enough not to fluctuate too much) and Monday was well over 7 times the normal volume, right up until 6:55am EDT this morning when it all stopped. A little odd, even if it was an IRC server getting shutdown. It didn’t come to a quick slowdown, it literally just stopped. Weird.
October 10th, 2006
We released SpamAssassin 3.1.7 today. It includes all the good bug fixes from 3.1.6 that we released on schedule (for the fourth time in a row) last Thursday, except the lint change to sa-update that I broke sa-update, for anyone who defines their own scores, with.
I’ve also added my Nagios plugin (”check_spamd”) for monitoring spamd to the contrib/ directory of the tarball in versions 3.1.6+. It’ll work with versions 3.1.1+ of SpamAssassin, but it’ll work best with 3.1.6+ as those versions deal with some quirks in IO::Socket::INET that can cause weird ping results.
October 10th, 2006
OK, maybe not for spammers, but I’m no more likely to believe that they’re taking efforts to prevent email abuse than that they are not.
Canada.com: Toronto Hydro rolls out wireless in continental first
Toronto Hydro Telecom launched its downtown WiFi project yesterday, offering full wireless Internet access throughout the financial district, with plans to have all of Toronto covered in three years.
Yesterday Toronto Hydro launched their wireless service, which they are providing for free until March 6, 2007. Hopefully they’re taking measures to prevent email (and other) abuse by doing things like port 25 blocking or throttling/limiting, otherwise this makes about as much sense as Google providing free WiFi to Nigerians. Heck in years of dealing with the public I’ve learnt that free anything is always going to be abused.
At least this is currently only in the financial district, so it shouldn’t be open to too much abuse from spammers sitting at home. Then again, some spammers make so much money that they can probably easily afford to live in the financial district, so watch out.
If anyone knows what address space this network is using or knows what is or isn’t being blocked, please let me know.
September 8th, 2006
Holy crap! On Wednesday we released Apache SpamAssassin 3.1.5 on schedule for the third, maybe fourth, time in a row. As Theo put it, “what’s the world coming to?!?” I’m not quite sure why we’ve been getting regular releases out but I expect it has some to do with wanting to get sa-update out and in use (some minor fixes to sa-update have been in the last couple releases) and that we’re not tied up with getting a big release out (3.2.0) yet. As it stands, I don’t expect to see a 3.2.0 release until at least late winter or early spring. There’s a lot of stuff in the 3.2 queue and we’ve been backporting most things that a user would notice to the 3.1 maintenance branch.
Anyway… for those who don’t believe software can be released on time:
On 7/25/2006 6:54 PM, Daryl C. W. O’Shea wrote:
> BTW, I’d like to release 3.1.5 on Friday. Maybe we’ll hit the end of
> August. 
On 8/30/2006 11:21 AM, Theo Van Dinter wrote:
> Apache SpamAssassin 3.1.5 is now available! This is a maintainance
> release of the 3.1.x branch.
>
> Downloads are available from:
> http://spamassassin.apache.org/downloads.cgi?update=200608300000
September 1st, 2006
The SpamAssassin Rules Emporium (SARE) has a bunch of rules for SpamAssassin. Many of them are good rules. Some of them get updated regularly. To update these rules Chris Thielen wrote, and continues to update, a bash script called rules_du_jour that automatically downloads and when necessary updates a server’s SARE rules.
The rules_du_jour script works fine and has been in use by thousands of people for quite some time. One problem, though, is that it only runs on *nix systems. It also needs to be updated when new rulesets are released. Not a significant task by any stretch, but it does add to a mail system’s administrative load.
Apache SpamAssassin 3.1.1 and beyond includes sa-update, a cross-platform Perl program that manages updating rulesets available via “channels” in a light weight fashion using the DNS to track ruleset versions and HTTP to download updated rulesets when necessary. SHA1 sums and GPG are also used to verify downloaded rulesets.
So far the only sa-update channel available is the default channel published by the Apache SpamAssassin Project (updates.spamassassin.org). In early July I created my own channels containing up to date SARE rulesets to gain experience with sa-update and to automate rule updates on my own systems. For some reason I have never used rules_du_jour myself. I think it’s size and need for updating when new rulesets released turned me off of it.
After much discussion about “rules_du_jour vs. sa-update” in early August on the SpamAssassin users’ list in this and this thread, I decided to make my SARE sa-update channels public. The discussion was largely a debate between long time users of rules_du_jour who were discounting the utility of sa-update and the SpamAssassin development team, along with a number of Windows users who can’t use rules_du_jour. I figured making the channels public would attract enough users to either quash fears about sa-update or identify any problems with sa-update. I’ll be happy with either result.
So far there hasn’t been any problems reported. There’s only been a couple people that have reported their satisfaction though. Numbers often tell a better story. In the last week there have been a few hundred diverse IPs that have download files from one or more channels (each SARE ruleset is in its own channel). Browsing the server logs it appears that a number of noteworthy engineering and computer networking organizations have been using the channels on their mail clusters too. Since no one has complained yet, I’m assuming all is well. I know, myself, I haven’t had any problems in the last month or so.
For those interested in using these sa-update channels, a brief how-to is available here. I was planning on writing some more detailed documentation, but it really is as simple (on *nix systems at least) as stated in the how-to. If anyone wants to contribute documentation for use on Windows or other systems that the how-to doesn’t seem to cover it would be welcomed.
August 19th, 2006
We released Apache SpamAssassin 3.1.4 today. Crazily enough, we actually hit our always vague target of July. Coincidentally, Theo sent out the release announcement, tonight, almost exactly a month after suggesting a July release.
On 6/27/2006 12:44 AM, Theo Van Dinter wrote:
> It’s been less than a month since we’ve done both 3.1.2 and 3.1.3, but I’d
> like to start down the path of getting 3.1.4 out in July.
On 7/26/2006 8:00 PM, Theo Van Dinter wrote:
> Apache SpamAssassin 3.1.4 is now available! This is a maintainance
> release of the 3.1.x branch.
>
> Downloads are available from:
> http://spamassassin.apache.org/downloads.cgi?update=200607261000
July 27th, 2006
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