Major E-mail Delivery for FTC DNCR Launch

Thu Jun 26 03:15:53 UTC 2003

Leo Bicknell wrote:

> * Make sure your mail servers are squeeky clean.  Forward and
>   reverse match, valid MX's, they report their own name in SMTP
>   headers, no "untrusted sender used -f", etc.  Valid abuse@
>   for the machine name, and the parent domain are essential.
>   Valid contacts for the domain and IP block are helpful.

In addition to having all the above properly setup so that your mail 
servers appear squeekly clean from the outside, make sure they ARE 
squeeky clean - on the inside.  You may wish to raise this issue on the 
spam-l mailing list:

<http://www.claws-and-paws.com/spam-l/>

The participants on spam-l will be happy to share with you the many ways 
spammers relay thru web and mail servers, and how to ensure (and test) 
that your servers can't be abused.  All the pre-emptive whitelisting in 
the world won't help you if your machines are open relays and spammers 
start sending spew thru your mail servers.  There are too many systems 
that will automatically blacklist your IPs if they start spewing actual 
spam, and then you will have to go one-by-one to each of them to get 
unblocked.  It's much better to avoid the problem by not letting your 
machines send any spam in the first place!

jc