I HATE Exim, its spam protection is crap. It doesn't reject messages with .pif, .scr

hariskhan

Well-Known Member
Apr 15, 2004
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1) Of all the crap with exim, so is its spam protection. It doesn't reject message with .pif or .scr attachments, it keeps them in the queue.

My customers want better spam protection, because their mailboxes have been filled with spam.

2) I have 79 messages in my queue. If it were qmail, it would'v been delivered within minutes.

I sent 2000 emails, 200 at a time and when I checked the queue, those email addresses were still in the queue after more than 36 hours had passed.

My server is running RH EL v3 on a P-IV 2.4 GHz which has 512 MB of RAM (420+ MB of which is always free) and stands on a 100 mbit backbone, with 0.4 msec ping time towards the internet and CPU load average 0.35. What would stop it from sending mails within 15 minutes or half an hour(at most)?

qmail sends millions of mails within an hour, exim can't deliver 2000? My collegue in another organization sends 50 million newsletters through qmail and I'm stuck with 2000 mails that can't be delivered within 36 hours?!?

Can't you give me something better?

This is worttless crap!!
 

chirpy

Well-Known Member
Verifed Vendor
Jun 15, 2002
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Go on, have a guess
Nothing at all wrong with Exim. If you want something that stops spam, you should install a antispam application. There are a couple mentioned in many posts here for MailScanner or Exiscan.

If you've got email being queued, then you most likely don't have Exim configured correctly for your environment. You're going to have to invest some time in learning how exim works if you're going to system manage a cPanel server. For example, do you regularly have long periods of server load avaerage over 3? If so, exim will wait until the load decreases and then continues processing email.
 

jester.ro

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PartnerNOC
Feb 6, 2004
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Bucharest, Romania
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DataCenter Provider
hehe
i also love qmail, as it runs smoothly on 2 of my servers, that both have over 50.000 email accounts on them. not to mention i use qmailscanner + spamassassin + clamav.


but what you're seeing in the exim queue is not exim's fault.
those are just errors. email with forged "from" is one of today's viruses way of acting.

so what happens is this:

someone has a virus, which sends emails on your behalf.
servers that receive those emails do not allow them to pass, so they send them back to the sender. which is...YOU. si exim tries to re-send them.
it's the way qmail works also. sendmail, postfix, all of them.

what you need to do is install an antivirus.
.pif and .scr files are not SPAM. they are viruses. spam is "buy viagra online" :))

an antivirus will drop those emails from the queue, and not retry them.

don;t bitch about exim. is slim, and easy to configure. qmail is a bithc at configuring.(at least in my setup)
 

Sheldon

Well-Known Member
Jun 7, 2004
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Canada
interesting threat we have here... question.. does anyone have or know where I can get an explanation of the exim configuration file?

(I dont even know where the exim.conf is anyhow)
 

hariskhan

Well-Known Member
Apr 15, 2004
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exim.conf location

Originally posted by Sheldon
interesting threat we have here... question.. does anyone have or know where I can get an explanation of the exim configuration file?

(I dont even know where the exim.conf is anyhow)
Usually on Red Hat systems, its a convension that all config files lie under /etc

On other platforms, it might be in /usr/etc/ or /usr/local/etc or in /usr/folder/where/exim/was/installed/etc/

Do a whereis exim.conf or locate exim.conf to find it.
 

hariskhan

Well-Known Member
Apr 15, 2004
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Does exim support spamassassin + clamav?

Does exim support spamassassin + clamav?

It would save me alot of grief to plug them both in with exim.
 

chirpy

Well-Known Member
Verifed Vendor
Jun 15, 2002
13,437
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Go on, have a guess
SpamAssassin is already configured to work within Exim. As I've already said, you can install either the Exiscan package talked about on this forum, or the MailScanner package, both of which do complete spam, virus and attachement scanning.

The exim configuration files are in /etc/exim.conf (if you have MailScanner installed, also /etc/exim.conf) plus others that plugin to it, like /etc/exim.pl

If you want to learn about Exim (which is a very simple but powerful extensible MTA) you can teach yourself by visiting:
http://www.exim.org