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Often I hear that one should block spam email based on content match rather than IP match. Sometimes even that blocking Chinese ranges in particular is prejudiced and racist. Allow me to debunk that after I've been looking at traffic on port 25 with tcpdump for several weeks now, and got rid of most of my incoming spam too.
There are these spamhausen that communicate with my mail server as much as every minute.
- biz-smtp.com
- mailing-expert.com
- smtp-shop.com
All of them are Chinese. They make up - rough guess - around 90% of the traffic that hits my edge nodes, if not more.
The network ranges I've blocked are apparently as follows:
- 193.106.175.0/24 (Russia)
- 49.64.0.0/11 (China)
- 181.39.88.172 (Ecuador)
- 188.130.160.216 (Russia)
- 106.75.144.0/20 (China)
- 183.227.0.0/16 (China)
- 106.75.32.0/19 (China)
.. apparently I blocked that one twice, heh
- 116.16.0.0/12 (China)
- 123.58.160.0/19 (China)
It's not all China but holy hell, a lot of spam sure comes from there, given how Golden Shield supposedly blocks internet access to the Chinese citizens. A friend of mine who lives in China (how he got past the firewall is beyond me, and he won't tell me either) told me that while incoming information is "regulated", they don't give half a shit about outgoing traffic to foreign countries. Hence all those shitty filter bag suppliers and whatnot. The Chinese government doesn't care.
So what is the alternative like, that would block based on content? Well there are a few solutions out there, namely SpamAssassin, ClamAV and Amavis among others. The problem is that they're all very memory intensive (especially compared to e.g. Postfix and Dovecot themselves) and that they must scan every email, and keep up with evasion techniques (such as putting the content in an image, or using characters from different character sets t̾h̾a̾t̾ ̾l̾o̾o̾k̾ ̾s̾i̾m̾i̾l̾a̾r̾).
But the thing is, all of that traffic comes from a certain few offending IP ranges, and an iptables rule that covers a whole range is very cheap. China (or any country for that matter) has too many IP ranges to block all of them. But the certain few offending IP ranges? I'll take a cheap IP-based filter over expensive content-based filters any day. And I don't want to be shamed for that.7 -
You know what, let me jump in on the "I hate PHP" bandwagon.
A couple months ago I upgraded my mail servers unattended. Roundcube got fucked for a couple of months, and I figured.. fuck it, I can still use Dovecot for authenticating with desktop mail clients like K-9.
Recently I unfucked it, turns out that it was an issue with the sock file in php-fpm. That's also when I noticed that PHP apparently hardcodes in its current version in the bloody socket file. Because why the fuck wouldn't you? It makes upgrades so much fucking easier!!! Said no fucking sysadmin ever!!!
And today I upgraded one of my mail servers to Ubuntu Server 18.04, finally, after a lot of hesitation. Bad decision, because now PHP got fucked YET AGAIN.
Again an issue with socket files? I have no fucking idea. systemctl shows no failed services (because you know PHP, why would you fail your service with an error message instead of throwing a meaningless 502 Bad Gateway, right?!!) and looking at the config files, well the socket file got its new php-fpm 7.2 file (still got the fucking version number hardcoded in) and thus I changed that socket file location in /etc/php/7.0...
devRant may just have been my rubber duck.
WHY THE FUCK DO YOU STINKING FUCKING PILE OF SHIT CALLED FUCKING PHP KEEP THE FUCKING 7.0 DIRECTORY OUT THERE WHEN YOU'VE UPGRADED, WITHOUT EVEN HAVING THE FUCKING BALLS TO RENAME THE MOTHERFUCKING DIRECTORY TO 7.2, IF YOU'RE GOING TO HARDCODE IN YOUR VERSION NUMBERS ANYWAY?!!!!!
Bloody fucking pile of fucking junk!!!!18 -
Oh man setting up postfix and dovecot (plus things like rspamd) is a pain in the ass.
But it's worth it, having your own mail server is just quite a good feeling.
Now I just need to find out how to get it to pass the spam filter of Google, despite the server and the DNS zone being well-configured (better than my school's mail server according to tests, but that one still manages to pass. I have no idea why.)9 -
WHY!
Email was invented a gazillion years ago and it's still a shiit experience to setup on linux. Just give me ONE complete package!!
nooo i need to get postfix, dovecot, spamassassain mailscanner, antivirus, opendmarc, opendkim, dovecot-managesieve dovecot-sieve, roundcube, database, webserver and then i still have to configure everything and setup certs, spf, dnssec, dkimkeys on the domains, domains, mailboxes, deny weak certs etc.
I know the whole do one thing and do that one thing well but how about you just be a mailserver and do that ONE thing well without me needing to putting all of the puzzle pieces together myself! I don't want to waste time setting all this shit up. and don't even get me started on symantec and live.com and their blocking!14 -
Need to change host for my sites, but no money for a good one. Trying to put everything in one cloud (5 USD) but... How the duck can I create a mail server with multiple domains?
A good fight with postfix, dovecot... The first account, just to the sake of make it work, is almost working (I reckon)9 -
I've been working on migrating my personal e-mail server for nearly a month.
Old (Linode): opensuse 13.1 (no longer gets update) running postfix + amavis-new(with spamassassin and clamav) + dkimproxy + dovecot
New (Vultr): OpenBSD 6.3 running opensmtpd + spampd(spamassassin proxy) + clamav + dkimproxy + dovecot
I'm surprised I only have 5GB of e-mail, considering I migrated all my gmail there a while back; 5GB for ever e-mail since 2004.
I finally got all the DNS switched over and tested all the end points this morning. The whole thing is done in Ansible so hopefully switching to another provider will be a lot faster:
https://github.com/sumdog/bee2/...4 -
Alright, here we go again with issues on Vector. (My home server that we're transitioning our website, infiniit.co to.)
I'm trying to get the email server up and running. It's a PITA which is evident by the fact we are now on attempt number 6, at least on the 6th VM now. At this time I'm installing a Ubuntu 16.04 LTS ISO and I'll be installing IRedMail unless someone else has any recommendations. So far I've had nothing but problems doing it manually, installing dovecot and postfix, trying to get them linked, and then the last failure was sending a test email locally.
Also, a continuation of the last issue that I had here, now my VMRC isn't working anymore for some reason. Ive forwarded websockets but it won't work unless I use local IP since everything (except direct local IP connections) is running through an apache VHost setup... My head hurts. Help pls.2 -
No...
I didn't spend the whole weekend (some 20 hours) wiping my server and setting it back up because it was a steaming pile of garbage...
then fucking it up again and redoing the whole process again....
.... and for good measure again because stupid me.....
GAAAAAAAAAAA
but at least it is working now :)
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