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August 2004

Mail Filtering with Fluffy the SMTPGuardDog

This open-source proxy server can be a spam fighter's best friend
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For my own network, I implemented the two DNS blacklists listed in Figure 5—SpamCop and Spamhaus. SpamCop has proved to be an efficient blacklist for my needs because it's completely automated and mathematically determines when to remove systems from the list. Spamhaus focuses its efforts on tracking only the most egregious spammers—the roughly 200 that Spamhaus estimates to be the cause of approximately 90 percent of the spam on the Internet. Because Spamhaus's focus is so narrow, I generally trust its blacklist for my networks and those of my clients.

Good Dog
The first day that I implemented Fluffy, my spam load decreased by 80 percent and I blocked several dozen executable attachments that were designed to infest my network. Now, Fluffy defers 700 to 1500 connections a week for mail to my domain—so much that Fluffy has made my email accounts usable again. Fluffy is well worth the minimal amount of effort needed to set up the system. Over time, I'm confident that Fluffy will improve and become even more robust. A few of the items expected to be added to Fluffy in the future (according to the program's author) are the ability to run Fluffy as a service and to automatically populate new whitelist entries according to outbound email going through Fluffy. If you want to avoid the scenario that cut short our administrator friend Joe's dinner plans, I suggest you take a look at Fluffy.

Resources
WEB SITES
Fluffy the SMTPGuardDog
http://smtpfilter.sourceforge.net

Network Abuse Clearinghouse
http://www.abuse.net/relay.html

SpamCop
http://www.spamcop.net

Spamhaus
http://www.spamhaus.org

WINDOWS & .NET MAGAZINE ARTICLES
MARK MINASI
This Old Resource Kit, " More About Srvany," March 2000, InstantDoc ID 8148
This Old Resource Kit, "Srvany," February 2000, InstantDoc ID 7959

End of Article

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Reader Comments
This article says when Fluffy detects
a blocked attachment that it will bounce back a message to the sender. Is this an email message to the alleged sender's email address as
opposed to a 550 protocol error to the IP address of the MTA? I want
to avoid sending email messages to the spoofed/forged email addresses
of innocent people.

cfrankb September 08, 2004 (Article Rating: )


Fluffy rocks man!.... one user reports she used to get 190 messages on weekends at times...down to 2!

bobo November 24, 2004 (Article Rating: )


I have been running Fluffy 1.52 for about 6 days...I have gone back to 1.495.

I have it running in front of a list serv box and It literally gets 6000+ spam messages a day. 99% get turned away with fluffy and I am not using the blacklists. I have had issue with fluffy, but it seems to be good. I just wish they were still developing it......

newk112 February 22, 2005 (Article Rating: )


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