etbe - Russell Coker

In my previous post about DKIM [1] I forgot to mention one critical item, how to get Postfix to actually talk to the DKIM milter. This wasn’t a bad thing because it turned out that I hadn’t got it right.
I had configured the DKIM milter on the same line as the milters for ClamAV [...]

I have just installed Domain Key Identified Mail (DKIM) [1] on my mail server. In summary the purpose is to allow public-key signing of all mail that goes out from your domain so that the recipient can verify it’s authenticity (and optionally reject forgeries). It also means that you can verify inbound mail. [...]

For some time people have been telling me about the benefits of SpamAssassin (SA). I have installed it once for a client (at their demand and against my recommendation) but was not satisfied with the result (managing the spam folder was too complex for their users).
The typical configuration of SA has it run after [...]

Nowadays it seems that most serious mail servers (IE mail servers suitable for running an ISP) use one file per message. In the old days (before about 1996) almost all Internet email was stored in Mbox format [1]. In Mbox you have a large number of messages in a single file, most users [...]

Update: Due to the popularity of this post I have created a T-Shirt and put it on sale at http://www.cafepress.com/email_eula .
Update: Unlike most of my blog content I permit anyone to copy most or all of this post for commercial use (this includes blogs with google advertising) as long as they correctly identify me [...]

One item on my todo list is to set up a bunch of email addresses on sub-domains of domains that I am responsible for (with the consent of all people involved of course) and perform various actions to get the addresses noticed by spammers and measure how effective the various anti-spam measures are. As [...]

Today I have released a significant new version of my mail server benchmark Postal! The list of changes is below:

Added new program bhm to listen on port 25 and send mail to /dev/null. This allows testing mail relay systems.
Fixed a minor bug in reporting when compiled without SSL.
Made postal write the date header [...]

Andre Pang blogs about the annoyance of email disclaimers. For a while I had a .sig indicating that it was a condition of sending email to me that the sender agrees to legalistic terms in their .sig being inapplicable to me.
220 smtp.sws.net.au ESMTP Postfix - by sending email to this server you agree that [...]

In response to my previous post someone pointed out that MX records have an obvious benefit of offering multiple servers at different priority levels.
I don’t believe that this is a benefit for many machines on the modern Internet. Most systems that have secondary MX records implement them poorly, they have less SPAM checks on [...]

One issue that has been the topic of some pointless discussion is whether a mail server should have an A record or an MX record. Mail can be delivered to a domain that has no MX record but simply an A record pointing to an IP address. But the most common practice is [...]