Spam on Evan Hoffman

Relaying through Google Apps using Sendmail to bypass EC2 spam blockage

Wed, 01 Dec 2010 14:48:06 +0000

Update 3 May 2011: I’ve subsequently modified our EC2 systems to relay SMTP mail through Amazon’s SES which doesn’t have the 500 messages per day limit that Google Apps does.

A few months ago I moved a site into EC2. I didn’t want to move the existing IMAP server (ugh) so I moved the email to Google Apps. There are only about 10 mailboxes so we went with “Standard” edition (free). Once we completed the move to EC2 we discovered that emails from our webserver were bouncing due to our EC2 IP address being listed in a spam RBL. This sucked, so I looked into relaying the mail from the EC2 webserver through our Google Apps account. Fortunately this turned out to be pretty easy.

We gon' party tonight

Sun, 17 Oct 2010 23:58:33 +0000

I use Akismet to filter out spam comments here, and I’ve seen a few different strategies the spammers employ. There’s the “Cool post! You should Digg it” (in both English and Spanish - tengo que Digg), there’s the “this post helped me on my class project,” there’s the pure jibberish - “xajdjhesbjsb sjhsjhrhjshwru skjskjrijsjs.” But this is a new one I’ve seen over the past couple of weeks:

Stupid things like this crack me up, not sure why.

We gon' party tonight

Sun, 17 Oct 2010 23:58:33 +0000

Stupid things like this crack me up, not sure why.

The Barracuda Spam Firewall VMware Appliance (Vx) finally exists!

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 18:24:12 +0000

When I started at my current company, spam was handled with a separate server running SpamAssassin and a few other services. This sort of got the job done but required babysitting. I wasn’t part of the Sysadmin team at that point but I know they had to restart SpamAssassin relatively frequently, manually clear out the email queue when people noticed they weren’t receiving email, etc.

After a few months, someone wised up and purchased a Barracuda Spam Firewall. I assumed this was basically a pretty GUI wrapper around the same tools we had already been using, but it was certainly worth the money. In addition to the basic filtering of spam it filtered for viruses, performed recipient verification against AD via LDAP, had nice graphing and reporting.

Blocking comment spammers by IP

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 11:59:27 +0000

I use Akismet to block comment spam, but it still annoys me that it even exists. Last night I put a simple IP ban into my httpd config. But who to block?

I used a grep & Perl to get a rough guess of which IPs were submitting the most comments (working on the assumption that one IP address submits many spam comments) It took me about 20 minutes to write this mess but it does what I wanted to do: [root@lunix ~]# zgrep POST /var/log/httpd/evanhoffman-access_log-201008??.gz | grep comment | perl -ne 'chomp; $_ =~ m/(?:\d{1,3}\.){3}\d{1,3}/; print "$&\n";' | perl -e '%a = (); while (<>) { chomp; $a{$_} += 1; } while (my ($key, $value) = each (%a)) { if ($value > 1) { print "$value\t=>\t$key\n";}}' 2 => 218.6.9.140 180 => 91.201.66.34 2 => 213.5.67.41 2 => 188.187.102.74 [root@lunix ~]#

This is the second notice that the factory warranty on your vehicle is expiring!

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 12:42:47 +0000

This is the second notice that the factory warranty on your vehicle is expiring!

I guess I’m not the only one getting these.