RE: [LUG] MAPS RBL

[John Horne <J.Horne at plymouth.ac.uk>]

On 29-Feb-00 at 18:26:51 Alex Charrett wrote:
> On Tue, 29 Feb 2000, John Horne wrote:
>> Oh yes. MAPS, DUL, DSSL, ORBS, and RSS :-)
> 
> Any opinons? as it ssems like a cool idea.
> 
Hmm, give a short answer and someone always wants the long one! Well without
(hopefully) giving away any secrets you can now see what we run on the
mailhub :-) The above services are provided through the DNS system. As such
you can download the zone files and thus avoid any network traffic for the
lookups, although it requires agreement with the service providers and
requires being kept up to date. We don't do this, but it may be worthwhile
if the number of mail servers in the Uni increases and if they use the
primary DNS as a forwarding server (i.e. look at your own DNS cache and then
the Uni's primary). This would avoid any network traffic out of the Uni.

We actually run caching name servers on most of the service systems so any
lookups are cached anyway (I have no idea about the time length though).
Other than that I *assume* that somewhere like the Linx root server may keep
cached copies to avoid us going across the Atlantic each time! Either way it
works well and we see no real degredation in service. All inbound mail is
checked in the blacklists, so you can guess that it is heavily used but the
network doesn't seem to mind :-) Our reject logs shows that it works :-)

I should add that in fact we don't now use ORBS because it gave too many
false positives. We were banning mail from known UK academic sites and
companies! DSSL has also packed up as far as I remember.

We also used to use lists of banned sites and users from
http://www.broomstick.com but they seem to have packed up for some reason.
(Neat web page though when you move the mouse :-) )

Alex: The exim configure line you would need would be:
  rbl_domains=rbl.maps.vix.com:dul.maps.vix.com:relays.mail-abuse.org/warn
  rbl_hosts = *

I should point out, in case anyone's getting any funny ideas!, is that we
operate our own lists of banned users, sites and networks as well which is
integrated with the mailhub.

John.

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John Horne, University of Plymouth, UK             Tel: +44 (0)1752 233914
E-mail: jhorne at plymouth.ac.uk
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