Spam attack

[charlesh]

Matt, et al,

I have sucessfully reduced the number of spams and the program is very powerful. however, I am having a hard time getting the whitelist to work on E-mails coming from haylee.gendns10.com> Basically, I am getting marked as spam stuff that is being automatically sent to me by the webserver, such as feedback and a contact us page info. How do I whitelist myself, basically? I can't get it to work and I've read everything I could possibly read and try... Any ideas?

Charlesh

[Matt]

Charlesh

Have you tried sending the emails using the FROM header instead of without it? Like from realaddress@yourdomain.com instead of the default which will come from the machine's hostname?

[charlesh]

Matt,

Sure did. Finally figured it out - Spamassasin looks for the from: address, not the from envelope. I was using haylee.gendns10.com as the "return", but it is whatever you specify in the header section as the from to whitelist. In fact, whitelisting with *@.domainname.com works as well. It should score at 100. I found that turning spamassasin on and then dialing up the "throttle" to like a 10 or so, will allow you to see what it is doing and scoring on in terms of headers, so you can modify your headers to produce a lower score for your e-mails.

As far as the blackberry thing, blackberry requires very specific headers in order for it to be happy. And, forget HTML type - only text at this point. Blackberry is aware of this problem.

So, below are some headers that I am using on a contact form that are working for blackberry devices. Note that I have a MIME boundary generated, but don't use it. I don't know what this does, but it didn't work without it.

 //To help out with the message end of lines...

if (strtoupper(substr(PHP_OS,0,3)=='WIN')) { 
  $eol="\r\n"; 
} elseif (strtoupper(substr(PHP_OS,0,3)=='MAC')) { 
  $eol="\r"; 
} else { 
  $eol="\n"; 
}  

$to  = 'blah@blah.com' . ', '; // note the comma for multiples
$to .= 'anotherblah@blah.com';


// subject
$subject = 'Subject Here';


$headers .= 'From: Mr. Email Man <blah@blah.com>'.$eol; 
$headers .= 'Reply-To: Mr. Email Man <blah@blah.com>'.$eol; 
$headers .= 'Return-Path: Mr. Email Man <blah@blah.com>'.$eol;    // these two to set reply address 
$headers .= "Message-ID: <blah@".$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'].">".$eol; 
$headers .= "X-Mailer: PHP v".phpversion().$eol;          // These two to help avoid spam-filters 
// Boundry md5 hash for marking the Headers 
$mime_boundary=md5(time()); 
$headers .= 'MIME-Version: 1.0'.$eol; 
$headers .= "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1; boundary=\"".$mime_boundary."\"".$eol; 


$message = 'You have just received a comment. Details to follow:'.$eol.$eol;
$message .= 'Name:'.$eol;
//keep going with the rest of the message...

//then, mail it
 
mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers); 
  

Hope that helps to anyone with the same problem.

Charlesh

[Matt]

In fact, whitelisting with *@.domainname.com works as well. It should score at 100. I found that turning spamassasin on and then dialing up the "throttle" to like a 10 or so, will allow you to see what it is doing and scoring on in terms of headers, so you can modify your headers to produce a lower score for your e-mails.

Thanks for the useful tidbits.

To clarify for others who may happen across this thread, is this correct?

*@.domainname.com

I would think it should be like:

*@domainname.com

(notice no DOT, after the @ symbol)

PS I am sure that blackberry snippit will come in handy for us soon, we are developing an application that needs this sort of functionality so will definately remember it if we run into similar issues.

[charlesh]

Matt,

Yes, that's right, no dot is required before the domain.

Also, what's weird about the blackberry stuff is that if you don't have the encoding and headers set just right, it may or may not decide to go get the message. This can lead to some very strange intermittent email issues. My client thinks that I had messed with something on the site and I still don't have him totally convinced that it is a blackberry issue. Ah well, most people only want stuff to work without any idea or concept of what goes on behind the scenes. Ah, OK. I'll stop ranting.

Charles H.