Noob Spam question

[SteveTPI]

Hi. I have Cpanel installed on a hosted account that I use for my business. Having had the same domain for over 12 years, we have incrementally established new ways and methods to fight spam. We currently receive 12,000 spams per day!!

Right now all our email goes to the catchall account and my office server pulls it off and runs it through a battery of antispam tests and then dishes it out to the employees. The methods that I have implemented are very very efficient and spam seldom gets to the desktop.

85% of my spam is to invalid addresses. I want to whack those at the host server to ease the burden of my office mail server.

So, what i want to do is have the 20 or so prefixes that are actually valid addresses go through and the rest :fail:

I am not at all proficient in Unix or Linux although I know enough to be dangerous. I don't want to have to set up 20 mailboxes on the host server end and pull them all off account by account. Is there a simple way.

Can someone maybe help me with a regex function that I can use in a filter??? Would that be a way to go?

Your help would be appreciated. I have done a search of the forum and can't quite find what I am looking for.

Thanks

Steve the Spam Killa!

[rustelekom]

you don't want setup 20 mailbox. you may setup one mailbox and 19 aliases. after this go to your default mail account (Cpanel menu item) and point it to :fail: or (which will better) to :blackhole:.
As result you you will get to your mailboxes only 15% of total amount of spam and then wash mails from spam which will be more easy and more effective than sort all 12000 mails...

[SteveTPI]

Yes. I was over analysing things. Too simple. Thanks

Now...which is better and will present less of a load on my host? :fail: or :blackhole:

Thanks again.

[NT]

:fail: is.

From what I've heard, :blackhole: still processes the mail then sends it to /dev/null, whereas :fail: refuses to accept the email during the SMTP conversation.

[rustelekom]

it's correct partially. but, when you use :fail: exim need answer to sender that recepient fail for some reason and that also hog a resourse. unfortunately, good way for terminating spam just not exist yet.

[serversphere]

Use :fail: -- check out this link to Chirpy's site on why you should always use fail. Good tips on setting up spam "arrests" there as well.

[chirpy]

it's correct partially. but, when you use :fail: exim need answer to sender that recepient fail for some reason and that also hog a resourse. unfortunately, good way for terminating spam just not exist yet.

Yup, that's wrong . See the link webtiva posted to my site.

[mikesmithfl]

Hi Chirpy:

I wanted to verify that this is still correct. When I added a new domain with email accounts the othe day, I noticed a new cPanel message on the "default address maintenance" page. The message was:
"Hint: You can enter :blackhole: to discard all incoming unrouted mail or :fail: no such address here to bounce it. If you wish to send to multiple address, please seperate them with a comma (,)"
It makes me wonder if cPanel may have changed the functionality of the destinations ":fail:" and ":blackhole:" or something.

Tks,
Mike

[chirpy]

That text is misleading, the advice I give regarding :fail: on my site still stands.

[mikesmithfl]

Thanks, Chirpy. And you're so right - that text is VERY misleading...