Backup mail server and spam

[placey]

Several months ago I turned on blacklisting on my mail server which reduced my spam count from about ~25/day to ~2/day. (Blacklisting is a blunt tool, I know, but it works for me.) Two days ago I turned on the Rimu Backup Mail Server service. Now I'm getting about 10 pieces of spam a day. By looking at my logs I can see that it's the Rimu server delivering it.

It's obvious that certain spammers are targeting all of the servers returned from an MX query, and while my server drops their connection, the Rimu server accepts it, and then turns around and delivers the spam to me.

Thoughts, anyone? Should I turn off the backup mail server service? Convince Rimu to adopt certain anti-spam measures? Is anyone else experiencing the same thing?

Pete

[retep]

See raintorr's posts here:
http://forums.rimuhosting.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=35

I'm not inclined to put any up front filtering on the backup mx server. Since its not 'my' mail to reject.

Personally I just have filters on all my incoming email. Spam gets tagged and dealt with.

Maybe you should run spamassassin on your VPS and have 'bad' email go to a separate account or be tagged.

Note: SA requires about 128MB of memory. And be sure to tweak /etc/init.d/spamassassin or /etc/defaults/spamassassin to set the 'clients' (or -m setting) to 1 (cf. 5 or 10 the defaults) to reduce memory usage.

[placey]

I can fully understand that you wouldn't want the backup MX server to reject any email, but how 'bout this...

What if Rimu were to run SpamAssasin (or whatever) but never reject any mail, simply put the spam likelihood percentage in the email header? Then backup MX users can optionally reject this mail using a simple filter rule in their mailserver without incurring the overhead of running SpamAssasin themselves.

Whaddya think?

- Pete

[arthur]

Hi, I use rimu's for backup mx as well and my spam all gets filtered as usual. When it comes back from the rimu server it just gets filtered by my vps filters, i use spamassasin plus some others including some written myself and also procmail filters written. I am [un]lucky to even get any spam either way now!
kind regards, Arthur