AOL Blacklists SIUE

[EvilAndrew]

According to OIT customer service (x3739), SIUE’s SMTP server has been blacklisted by AOL.  I have been assured that they are working on the problem, but at this time any attempts to send e-mail to @aol.com accounts from SIUE's campus (or webmail) results in server errors that refer you to this page.  

http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/554rlyb2.html

The errors are returned to you in a message failed e-mail.  It should be noted that receiving this message does not mean that you did anything wrong.  It just means that last week SIUE’s mail server did something AOL didn’t like.  Customer service says that it was just a virus but, I suspect that AOL would have un-blacklisted us by now if that were the full extent of the problem.

[Tyler]

Maybe this will help push people away from AOL.

More than likely, however, it will only hurt SIUE.

[Peter Motyka]

AOL is quite vigilant about their email abuse policy.  The company I work for was blocked at one time too, but for a much more harmless reason.  We simply didn't have a PTR (Reverse) DNS record for our mail server and messages to @aol.com addresses were failing because of this.

http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/#dns

I find their practices appropriate for the current spam-malware-etc-ridden email climate on the internet.

Speaking of which, I see SIUE is now employing Sophos spam filtering?  How is this working out?

[Bryan]

This was actually caused by a virus that hit around 8 computers on SIUE's campus.  There was an 6-8 hour window from when the virus was released to when the Sophos software on our server was updated with the protection. In that time around 8 computers were infected with a variant of a virus that installed smtp servers on people's computers and targeted AOL for spam.  The problem has been "remedied" but as all things at SIUE (and I'm sure AOL) take...nothing but time.

and yes Andrew, we've been using Sophos spam filtering for well over a year, and it's working great.

[Peter Motyka]

and yes Andrew, we've been using Sophos spam filtering for well over a year, and it's working great.

Any stats on how many messages are blocked, falsely categorized as spam, and suspected as spam?  I ask because I'm assisting with the implementation of a free-software-based anti-spam email gateway at work and would like to know what commercial offerings are capable of.

[Bryan]

I can tell you personally I get 20-30 messages a week that are blocked.  Some faculty have reported in the hundreds and one particular faculty member over a thousand a week. We believe he was victim of some rather vindictive students signing him up for mailing lists unknowingly.  It does a very good job, signing in yoruself at see at http://spam.siue.edu your e-id and password are the username/pass.  I worked for OIT before we had it..and after..I can tell you that there is a very noticable difference.

[Peter Motyka]

ModernDayDarwin wrote:
It does a very good job, signing in yoruself at see at http://spam.siue.edu your e-id and password are the username/pass.

I'd like to check it out but SIUE does not offer alumni email accounts :(

[Matthew Thomas]

tfizzle wrote:
Maybe this will help push people away from AOL.

More than likely, however, it will only hurt SIUE.

Stupid AOL. It seems almost everything they do is to shoot themselves in the foot.

On a side note... If you see any AOL CD's, send them to www.nomoreaolcds.com . I've already sent in a few, but they need a lot more help.

[bill corcoran]

We currently have two machines set up to do mail scanning.  The following stats are from an automatically generated report.  I do not know the number of falsely categorized messages.  I'm sure there is a way to retrieve it, but I do not have access.

Date/Time   Messages   Virus   Spam   Other

2005-06-30 23:00   57915   584   35239   22092
2005-07-01 23:00   73618   1037   47160   25421
2005-07-02 23:00   55797   678   38461   16658
2005-07-03 23:00   59763   580   39514   19669
2005-07-04 23:00   61033   1208   40804   19021
2005-07-05 23:00   84475   1298   50767   32410
2005-07-06 23:00   95595   1318   61816   32461
2005-07-07 03:00   7976   162   4678   3136

2005-06-30 23:00   61210   833   36399   23978
2005-07-01 23:00   78162   1207   49115   27840
2005-07-02 23:00   58010   1074   39311   17625
2005-07-03 23:00   61751   833   38182   22736
2005-07-04 23:00   60240   969   41061   18210
2005-07-05 23:00   88795   1221   52182   35392
2005-07-06 23:00   100578   1078   65514   33986
2005-07-07 07:00   19204   288   12117   6799


One set for each machine.  You can add them for the totals.  You can thank xoops for destroying the nicely tab formatted whitespace.

[Peter Motyka]

bill wrote:
We currently have two machines set up to do mail scanning.  The following stats are from an automatically generated report.  I do not know the number of falsely categorized messages.  I'm sure there is a way to retrieve it, but I do not have access.

Would you mind sharing what your email-scanning platform is?  We've decided to go with Exim4/MailScanner/ClamAV/Spamassin, after carefully comparing it against Postfix/Amavis-new.  The deciding factor was the reporting features of MailScanner.  From what I understand, MRTG can be hooked in to provide graphical representations of the type of data you posted.  Also, MailScanner is capable of stripping annoying HTML markup from messages.  I'm not certain we will use this feature, but I'm an advocate for enabling it.  Seems people around here find the use of lame backgrounds and cutesie fonts in email acceptable.  Perhaps such crap will be prohibited when our email 'acceptable use policy' falls more in line with standard netiquette practices.

[William Grim]

pmotyko wrote:

Also, MailScanner is capable of stripping annoying HTML markup from messages. I'm not certain we will use this feature, but I'm an advocate for enabling it.

I remember when I setup snow.cs to deny any email sent with HTML after receiving numerous annoying HTML messages from one CAOS officer.  It took me a while to realize she stopped showing up because she stopped being able to communicate via the mailing list, HAHAHAHAHA!

[Jerry]

grimw wrote:
 It took me a while to realize she stopped showing up because she stopped being able to communicate via the mailing list, HAHAHAHAHA!

                  :shocking:

                   

[bill corcoran]

we're running sendmail 8 with puremessage 4.  sophos puremessage scans for both spam and viruses.  it does also provide graphical reports through a management web interface, but, like i said before, i just don't have access.

personally, i really like the idea of stripping html out of mail.  certainly seems like a better idea than blocking it.  but people really like their goofy smiley faces, eye straining colors, fonts, and tacky backgrounds.  oh well.