Email Server Solution

[Steve Buehler]

At 11:09 AM 7/28/2005, you wrote:
>trying to get a better sense of your environment ...
>
>are you doing pop/imap (and providing outbound relay) on these servers,
>or is the mail that's being handled "e-commerce" (outbound mailings as
>the result of transactions and (bulk-ish) mailings to a site's users)?
>
>if only e-commerce, what is the volume of the *inbound* mail (i would
>assume, mailings from site owners to lists that then spawn). if
>imap/pop/relay, what are the in and outbound volumes?
>
>in terms of your block - are they blocking one of your IPnumbers, or by
>domain. we all know that domain blocking is foolish (and the RBLs don't
>do that, but it's hard to tell what aol is doing at any point in time)
>since spammers routinely hijack domains for the From: and return-path.
>
>in addition to the block messages, you should get back some bounces.
>look at these to make certain that your ipnumbers aren't showing up as
>the source (this is sometimes forged, but with some effort you can
>figure out which ones are real.  if your ipnumbers are showing up you
>need to find the hole in your system(s), and then work on repairing your
>reputation with the rbls (which can be tricky).
>
>i have a fair bit of experience with mail and mailings, (and spam ...)
>etc. so may be able to give some help, but could use a little better
>sense of your environment.

Rick
         We host clients websites.  So they pop/imap in.  It does 
outbound, but not what I would consider a relay.  Yes, they can send 
email out through our servers, but only with authentication.  So just 
because you know someones email address, if you don't know their 
password, you wouldn't be able to send mail through our servers 
unless you also know their password.  There are also mailing 
lists.  Small ones and we verify that they are using double-opt-in to 
sign people up.  There are stores on the servers that allow for 
mailing the customers of the stores too.
         I just talked to a few clients about AOHell and found that 
the new AOHell 9 has a feature that solves the AOHell problem.  When 
they upgrade to version 9, it auto blocks everything but specific 
addresses that the customer wants to receive email from.  So if you 
don't know you are getting a message from somebody and haven't 
unblocked their email address, then it will block any sent to you.  I 
am assuming that it will allow them to unblock whole domains too.  I 
don't have an AOHell account, so I can't test it.  I will also not 
get one because I don't want to support a service that is trying to 
force the world to switch to them in the way they have been doing it.
         Now, the problem that we have is with customers that have a 
virus on their computer and it sends out to everybody in their 
address book or just plain sends out to random email addresses on the 
net.  When that happens, we can and have been put on RBL lists 
because the people receiving them marks them as spam.  I need an 
outbound email virus checking solution that won't slow down the 
systems or a separate server to do the outbound.

Thanks
Steve