[olug] Quick Anti-spam hint.

[Daniel Linder]

Last week I updated my linder.org DNS zone to add two additional "fake"
mail (MX) records (mail1 and mail2).  These records point to two IP
addresses that don't have anything listening on them, hence anyone
attempting to send e-mail to them will fail.

I set the priority of the these new servers so that one was higher and one
was lower than my real mail server.  There is a theory that some SPAMers
will send mail to the highest numbered MX entry (least desirable mail
server for a domain) in an attempt to bypass any anti-spam measures that
are setup on the primary server.

The theory is that the infected PC's on the Internet acting as e-mail
zombies for spammers don't want to implement the full e-mail RFC (which
mandates a retry of successive MX servers) and only send to the primary MX
server.

I can't remember where I heard the initial recommendation for this
anti-spam idea, but I implemented on my linder.org domain and it appears
to have cut down my spam dramatically.

Dan

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"Wait for that wisest of all counselors, time." -- Pericles
"I do not fear computers, I fear the lack of them." -- Isaac Asimov