monline

First of all: install exim
Now we have to reconfigure it, because by default it won't deliver any mails to any external address:

The last reply to this post contains the answer. The mail command does not report any -r option if you run it with mail --help (neither does the manpage mention it), but it's there and works. It's a bit hidden and you've to apply it in a special way.

After Washington Post handed over the investigation material -that it collected over the last months- to various ISPs, the servers of McColo Corp. were cut off from the internet. Several security firms confirmed that the event resulted in a serious drop of spam-level world-wide.

I use SpamAssassin to filter out most of the junk and I also keep a record (sender, recipient, date, subject, etc.) of all the spam that gets automatically deleted by my filter. I've taken a quick look at my spam stats and there was indeed a huge drop between 11st Nov and 12nd Nov.

I just did a little survey on my own. My spamfilter is set up in a way that it logs each letter into a logfile (spam and ham both into their own logfiles) and keeps record of some of the emails' properties (From, To, size, matching Spamassassin filters, date, ...). The spamfilter works pretty well: 95% of real spam is identified as spam and only a very small number of emails (let's say 0.1%) is a false positive (where I mean a ham is identified as spam). According to my logs it seems that most of the time only 1/3 of all incoming mails is ham and 2/3 is spam. Around Christmas and New Year's Eve things got a lot worse: 4/5 of all my incoming mail was spam! Thanks to Spamassassin I could still enjoy reading my mail even during Christmas.

I did not know how exactly MTAs work, when they try to deliver a mail to the recipient. airwin helped me out: the MTA tries to look for an MX record for the given domain name. If found, then the given mail server is contacted. If not, then the host with the given domain name is contacted directly.

The task is trivial, the solution not. Fortunately there's a Perl module written for exactly what we aim to do. It's called Email::Find and it can be installed through the libemail-find-perl package on Debian based systems.

There're a few things about conditions in procmail recipes that are not quite trivial from the procmailrc manpage, but you should know if you want to understand how things work.

Wikipedia has a comparison of webmail providers, although it is very short and lists only the biggest players. However in my country (Hungary) the three most popular are: Freemail, Citromail and Vipmail.

Levelezőlistákkal kapcsolatban magyar nyelven a legtöbb infot a levelezolista.lap.hu címen találod. Levlista szolgáltatásokkal kapcsolatban nézd az előző linken a "Készíts levelező listát magad" című szekcióban található oldalakat (pl. lev-lista.hu, www.lx.hu, lista.prim.hu). Illetve nemrég találtam a www.nonprofit.hu-t, ahol szintén ingyenesen üzemeltethetsz levelezőlistát.

All you need to do is to issue the following command:

To test whether it works or not, try one of the demo scripts that come with libnet-dns-perl. In Debian they reside in the following location: /usr/share/doc/libnet-dns-perl/examples/demo/*