On Tue, 10 Apr 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote:
On Tue, 10 Apr 2007, Junio C Hamano wrote:
One thing that people need to be careful about is which SMTP
server they use.
ABSOLUTELY!
There are a ton of spam blockers that simply *refuse* to accept email from
people who just randomly send to port 25.
For example, I will personally never see email that comes directly to my
email address though an open mail relay *or* from something that appears
to be just a random botnet PC (I forget the exact rule, since I'm hapily
ignorant of MIS, but I think it boils down to requiring a good reverse DNS
lookup).
Depending on your definition of "good".
I run my mail server off my DSL line. I prefer having control over my
mail server instead of being chained to what my ISP provides. (The
problems of having been a sysadmin for way too many years.) I don't have
control over the reverse ip address, but I do over my DNS resolution.
(Well, most of it. A couple domains are sitting on really old dns servers
from years past.)
That's getting much more common. Most spam is done through botnets, and
they still try to do the direct-to-port-25 thing, exactly because if you
go through a *real* SMTP host, your ISP will generally shut you down
pretty quickly if you're spamming.
Which makes Greylisting a useful tool. However, some people define a
"real SMTP host" as being the one your ISP provides and no other. No
matter how good your OS or how stringent your rulesets for sending mail
are.
So special spammers with their own machines will work with ISP's that
don't care (they make money off the spammers), but botnets depend on
cracked Windows machines, and those often have ISP's that *do* care,
because they get complaints and it costs them money if they don't.
And the various RBL lists will just nuke everyone in the same class c. (I
have seen it happen for people at colos. Someone on the class c get
compromised, sends spam and the whole address space gets blocked.
Sometimes I think the anti-spam methods are as obnoxious as the spammers.
Almost.)
I had an impression (I do not use send-email myself) that it defaulted
to local MTA, so the mail trail would look like your local MTA receives
from the MUA (which is send-email), which forwards it to whereever
destination (or intermediaries).
A lot of people configure their MUA to send specially, and never even
configure their MTA at all apart from whatever default configuration it
has.
But the people who use git are probably the exceptions. (At least I hope
so...)
A number of programs assume that the local MTA can send mail. (The bug
handling software for Gnome is an example of that.)
This sounds more like a distro problem though. The MTA configuration
should be a proper part of an install, not something that you have to
uncover and piece together later.
Of course I also believe that Sendmail configuration was designed by an
organic chemistry major as part of an "experiment" in ergot derivitives.
--
"Invoking the supernatural can explain anything, and hence explains nothing."
- University of Utah bioengineering professor Gregory Clark
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