Komuves Consulting Anti-Spam Campaign

Komuves Consulting
Anti-Spam Campaign

As of 2014-07-14, Komuves Consulting has ceased supporting it's own anti-spam measures after selling the kom.com domain (after doing so for 20 years!). Dealing with spam effectively for a very small number of users like this just became too large of a time sink. This page just remains for historical reference.

Komuves Consulting has a policy of not allowing anyr unsolicited bulk email (spam) of any sort to be sent to or sent by any of its users. Filtering of incoming spam email happens at the SMTP connection level using Sendmail, which is being run here with all of its built-in anti-spam provisions. I make use of several blackhole facilities, including my own banned list. If a banned site tries to send email to any of my users, they will receive a descriptive error while connecting to the SMTP port, which will refuse to accept the email. If spam is received by a user, they can simply bounce or forward the message with full headers intact to abuse@kom.com.

Here is a publically-viewable log of spammer rejection statistics for this server, which is automatically updated daily.

Spam Filters/Tools Used Here

Sendmail Anti-Spam Provisions. Including verifying headers for valid sender hostnames.
Komuves Consulting Banned List. My own blocking list.
Spamhaus Block List, spamhaus.org List of IP blocks of static spam sources, including known spammers, spam operations and spam support services.
Spamhaus Exploits Block List, spamhaus.org Lists of IP blocks of Illegal 3rd party exploits, including proxies, worms and trojan exploits.
SpamAssassin. Rule-based filter that uses header and text analysis, as well as blacklists.
Web Poison. To make it difficult for spammers who troll for email addresses for our Web sites, I have also implimented a version of this in a responsible fashion.

Komuves Consulting Banned List
This is now maintained just to catch any miscellaneous spammers who get past the other services we use. When spam is sent to one of our users and reported, at a minimum, the mailserver that relayed the spam is banned, or if the relay is a known large email provider (hotmail.com, aol.com, yahoo.com, etc.) the email address is banned. If the spam is generated from a domain that specializes in spam, or if the domain is a repeat offender and does not make an honest effort to eliminate spamming by it's users, the offender's entire domain and/or IP block is banned.

Whenever an email address, domain, or IP block is placed onto our list of banned sites, the site administrators of the banned site are notified of the action, and given a chance to appeal. If they make a good faith effort to improve, and terminate the offending users' accounts, the ban will be lifted.

Send Email To Appeal An Existing Ban

Our banned list may be freely used by anyone who wants it. Here is a sample script that can be used to grab the latest copy of our banned list. If you set it up as a cron job, please do not download it any more than once per day, as that would be pointless. If you do use it, please send email letting me know your domain name so that it can be added to the participating domain list. The participating domains that currently filter their email based on the list above are: dungeoneer.com, food.net, kom.com, landscapearchive.com, martineschocolates.com, poolsrv.com, and thoughtrights.com.

Current List of Banned Sites/Rejection Messages

Other Recommended Spam Filters/Tools and Anti-Spam Sites

postmaster.rfc-ignorant.org This is a list of sites that do not have a Postmaster address as required by RFCs. If I were just running this mailserver for myself, I would include use of this facility (which would exclude standards-violators like AOL).

AOL Violates Internet Standards by Eliminating Postmaster Address!