[ale] Monitoring outgoing emails on Postfix, filtering incoming bounce back messages

Warren Myers volcimaster at gmail.com
Mon Jun 25 18:23:24 EDT 2007


A thought: you may be able to grep for just 'undeliverable' or 'bounce'

It's also possible the mail isn't being sent through your server: at a
previous $WORK, we had intermittent gushes of undeliverable email, that when
you scanned the headers, wasn't even related to our domain, but the
reply-to: or from: fields were being spoofed.

WMM

On 6/25/07, Jay Loden <ale at jayloden.com> wrote:
>
> I've been getting a LOT of bounce back messages from mails I didn't send,
> and I think someone's found my email address and started spamming with my
> address. Pulling a 'joe job' on me as it were. It's causing me to get dozens
> of out of office replies, receipt failures, and "illegal content" bounces in
> my inbox. :(
>
> First and foremost, I'd like to make doubly sure that nothing is going out
> of my server that I did not send (there are only two users using my server
> for sending mail). Can anyone provide a quick way I can get visibility into
> outgoing messages from my postfix mail server? I was thinking even just a
> tail -f on the mail.log file piped through an appropriate grep would be
> fine, or tcpdump, etc. but I couldn't think of what to grep for. Any
> suggestions? I just want to get a rough idea of what and how much is going
> out of my mail server.
>
> On a related topic, any better suggestions on how to filter out all these
> annoying bounce messages? I set up a couple procmail rules for the time
> being but it'd be nice if there was a less complex/difficult to maintain
> method. I do have spamassassin running and filtering a lot of spam, and I
> use Thunderbird's junk filter, but since these aren't actually spam per se,
> they're not getting filtered well (if at all).
>
> Thanks,
>
> -Jay
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>



-- 
http://warrenmyers.com
"God may not play dice with the universe, but something strange is going on
with the prime numbers." --Paul Erd?s
"It's not possible. We are the type of people who have everything in our
favor going against us." --Ben Jarhvi, Short Circuit 2
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...




More information about the Ale mailing list