Bloody Vikings

Tuwa — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 15:11:05 -0800

How do I find out if a small, volunteer-run freenet is allowing one or more of its email accounts to send out spam (as compared to, say, being Joe-jobbed)? I'm volunteer webmaster for a small local not-for-profit venture hosted on a local volunteer-run freenet. As webmaster, I inherited the site's old URL and email address, which gets a lot of spam (legit email at that account is probably <5%). That's not the question, though.

Occasionally I'll get Joe-jobbed, getting spam which appears to be from me at that address. This will usually come in a batch with literally hundreds of other spam, quite a lot of them presenting themselves as from that same domain, and many of them with viruses attached.

Is there any easy way to find out if any of the accounts at this domain are actually sending any of these emails, aside from looking through the full headers of each and every one? I'd love to find the source of the problem and bring it to the freenet's attention, if anyone there will be able to do anything about it (like suspending an offending account).

Setting up SPF on shared hosting

hodyoaten — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 08:09:14 -0800

An AskMefi question today about joe-job spam has me interested in setting up a preventative SPF record for my business server, which is a hosted domain at Dreamhost. However I do all my mail through my home DSL, connecting via SMTP to my domain at Dreamhost. Is an SPF record a viable solution? Can I put in a range of my ISP's addresses to whitelist them in SPF? I looked at OpenSPF's wizard and am overwhelmed by all the mx, ptr, a:, ip4:, etc questions it asks; it looks too dangerous to mess around with. I tried the Dreamhost support boards but questions about SPF there are unanswered; their Wiki is nonspecific. I also wonder how long it takes for a change to propagate, in case my server moves.

Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with joejob

Bloody Vikings

Setting up SPF on shared hosting