RE: Spam emails

[Andrew Coghlan]

Having had an Eventum install running for public (i.e. external customers)
for some time now, I have found that configuring the mail server & Eventum
in the following way has prevented 99% of spam coming through.

1.	Firstly, use addressed based routing, not subject based.  This means
that each ticket uses a unique (i.e. dynamic) email address, so there isn't
a single address floating around for spammers to pick up on.
2.	install grey-listing on your mail server.  This is a pretty good way
of killing most spam in itself, but isn't really an Eventum solution.
There's lots of information about grey listing around, just Google it.
3.	Structure your mailboxes in a way that helps prevent spam; for
example, our main support address is support@stripped.  This is where you
would send an email to when you initiate a support ticket.  However, all
subsequent emails come from and are addressed to
issue_xxxx@stripped.  It is easy to configure this in Eventum, and
it means you can have a catchall mailbox on a domain that doesn't have any
other inbound email (i.e. support.domain.com).  This also means you can host
that email anywhere, and you don't necessarily have to get your IT guys to
specially configure your mail server (for some people that is a real pain).
This type of address is not likely to receive any spam mail as the various
algorithms that generate email addresses to send spam to generally don't
send to sub-domains.
4.	To wrap it up even tighter, rather than having an email address
available for people to initiate a support ticket, use a web form.  Even if
that form simply emails the content into Eventum (so you don't then need to
worry about how to interface into the DB) it means you can hide the email
address from public view so it will never get picked up by the spam engines.

In short, Bryan is right - you need to deal with spam outside of Eventum.
But there are some ways you can configure your system to help prevent it
getting sent to you in the first place.

Hope that helps.

Andrew

-----Original Message-----
From: Bryan.Alsdorf@stripped [mailto:Bryan.Alsdorf@stripped] 
Sent: 17 September 2008 16:23
To: lwazi@stripped
Cc: eventum-users@stripped
Subject: Re: Spam emails

Lwazi Mboni wrote:
> How to block recurring spam email coming to our eventum gateway ?

This should be handled by the mail server, nothing special in Eventum.

Best Regards,
-- 
Bryan Alsdorf, MySQL Support Manager, Systems
MySQL @ Sun Microsystems, Inc., http://www.sun.com/mysql/

-- 
Eventum Users Mailing List
For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/eventum-users
To unsubscribe:
http://lists.mysql.com/eventum-users?unsub=1