This is just a heads up to everyone out there to be extra careful when handling email.  We have seen an explosive increase in the number of attacks brought about to every day citizens through email.  From SPAM with fake links, to Internet Scams that these fraudsters want you to invest your time and money in, to Viruses/Trojans/Back doors, and of course Phishing attacks where someone pretends to be from some place familiar to you like your bank, eBay or PayPal in an attempt to get your account information.

There are some basic steps to take like using good anti-virus software, and making sure it is kept up to date, that can help you stay safe.  We posted an article a while back with these explained, and I believe we should take a look at updating it since it’s been a year or two.  The basic principals stay the same, and there is still lots of good info there, we will most likely just be adding more stuff to deal with new threats.  Take a look at it here, it’s called Web Surfing Safety, and we hope you find it useful.  In addition to that, be sure to check out the Library, since we have lots of other good information and tidbits in there too!  Thanks.

Guess what kiddies, in troubleshooting an email connection for a customer that was unable to send any email through one of my servers, I found the problem was not quite what I expected.  The good news is that the problem wasn’t my mail server, or even on my end at all for that matter.  After some testing and digging I found that the problem is that Verizon has now blocked ALL out bound port 25 traffic.  Period.  As you know, port 25 is the standard RFC compliant port for SMTP communication, and Verizon has blocked all port 25 traffic as a means to fight SPAM.  Uh-huh.  Sure.

This means that you cannot use any other email provider for sending mail unless they support a non-standard port for their SMTP service, or you are using webmail exclusively.  This, to me, is wrong on so many levels.  First off, it’s not helping in the SPAM wars as far as I can tell.  I am told the same thing by some Verizon customers I surveyed.  Second, it’s just wrong to cut out basically all other mail providers like that.  This is yet another example of how stupid Verizon is, and how they cannot manage their service at all.

I have done business with many, many telco’s over the years, and Verizon tops the list by a mile of the worst service providers to deal with.  Some of the most incompetent people, bone headed mistakes and plain batshiat crazy experiences have all been at the hands of Verizon.  I hope this is just the first of many nails in their coffin.

One last thing, conveniently enough, the only way around this is to upgrade to FIOS (or other non-specified broadband service) and pay extra for a static IP address.  How nice.  Read more here.

OK folks, I came up with something helpful and I thought I would pass it on.  Recently I had a spam bot (or maybe a real person, who knows) join the forums.  Went right through all of the security controls and verifications.  Then, said user went about posting almost 500 porn posts all over my site’s forums.  Posting topics, posts, pics and embedded videos, it was really bad and I was really mad.  First off I banned the user, no problem.  I figured I would do that so I could keep relevant info like IP and email addresses rather than just deleting him.  Now I had the arduous task of removing all those damn posts and topics.

I do know that you can delete a user and tell SMF to also delete all of those users topics posts as well, but that hasn’t worked in the past so I did it on my own. Here is what I did.

Read the rest of this entry »

Although you can read the Monty Python skit here, I am talking about email spam. Lately I have been inundated with spam, and it’s aggravating me. I use MailWasher which I recommend to people for filtering spam at the user level, and it does a superb job. However, I really want to stop spam at the server level. I am now on a quest, or mission if you will, to figure out how to stop spam (at least as much as I can) from passing through my server and even getting to the user level. So, as I go forth on my spam fighting quest, I will bring you along with me and share what I find. Maybe we can all move a step forward in overcoming the spam epidemic.

More to come …