RainDrop Laboratories Status

Around labor day, the spammers went into overtime, and ever since, the antiquated spam filtering system on agora hasn’t been keeping up well.  I’ve been trying to get time to work on a new system with all the bells and whistles, but it’s a big task, and I’ve run into a problem I don’t know how to work around yet.

So, it’s time for Plan B: I’ve got it worked out how to build a much simpler, less fancy spam filter front end that should solve the problem.  Unfortunately, with a conference to go to this week and Thanksgiving next week, it’s still going to be a little bit before I can get it implemented.  It shouldn’t be much longer though — even with the traveling, I should be able to find time to work on it some, and should be able to bring it up by early December.  Hang in there just a little longer!

As I review dialup usage in order to make alternate access plans as needed, I note that fewer than 50 people have used the dialups in the last week.  Although I’ve noticed usaged dropped off a lot this year, I didn’t realize it was that low.  If you use dialup, but haven’t logged in recently, let me know so I can make appropriate plans — yes, that means I’m looking at phasing it out, but I will provide for you so you’re not left in the lurch, if I know you’re using the service.

Apparently a lot of people are paying for dialup service and not using it, so many of you will see a rate decrease when this happens, though when it will happen depends on a number of things, mainly what happens with Integra tomorrow…

But the upshot is, let me know if you’re using dialup infrequently, so I can make plans…  Thanks!

Apparently, Integra (the telco I use for the dialin lines) charged me an extra fee recently and I didn’t notice — I have checkfree sending them the payment automatically. I just got a disconnect notice Saturday with a deadline of Tuesday for a $60 amount “past due”, and of course they’re not open this weekend, so there’s absolutely nothing I can do, if they really plan to turn off the lines. Needless to say, I’m *not* happy. I suspect they won’t actually turn them off, but just in case, I wanted to warn everyone about the possibility.

If it comes to it, I’ll make alternative provisions for access, post the info here and set up a voice message at 541-754-1531 with more information.

Sorry about this, I really am paying the bill, this just caught me off guard… I’ve sent them the $60 and left voice and email, so hopefully that will take care of it…

As some have been noticing, the increasing spam load has been driving the mail server into defensively rejecting new connections while it processed the crap being fed to it.  This makes it difficult for mail client programs to send mail, which don’t queue it up the way other servers do.

For a short term fix, I’ve adjusted the timeouts on sendmail in order to try to cut down the impact of the incoming spam.

The long term solution is to setup a separate server for outgoing mail that won’t be affected by the incoming mail.  While the server itself isn’t hard to setup, enabling it to authenticate (i.e. you login to send mail, required to prevent it from becoming a spam relay itself) is a much thornier problem…

The new machine is pretty much operational, and I’ve been digging into the mail server interface on the spam filter, but it’s not being cooperative.  I may have to replace it, but I’ll give it another go here shortly…

I sold my desktop machine wednesday night (while it was still worth something useful ;-) ) and bought it’s replacement yesterday; with backing up the old one and getting the new one setup, that’s set things back a few days, but I should get back to the spam filter this weekend…

The code to handle individual recipients accordingly is there, but the smtp library that interfaces it to the mail system is throwing some roadblocks in the way it handles temp files.  I think that’s mostly fixed, but there’s still some debugging to do.  Probably won’t be able to get to it until tomorrow night though…

Progress is being made on the new spam filter; the sticking point at the moment is dealing with the case where some recipients of a message want filtering and others don’t.  Hopefully I’ll get through this one tonight, and then it’ll just be a matter of building a user interface to the settings and quarantine area…

Spam has increased dramatically lately, and the old filtering on agora is even less capable of coping. There is help on the way though: I’m making good progress on a new front end filter that will not only be running current spam and virus filtering, but it will eventually allow better user control over how it works. It currently does:

• white/blacklist processing
• greylisting (if mail hasn’t been seen before from this sender, issue a temporary error once and see if they retry it — real servers will, spammers often won’t — this is cutting the load in half on agora even now)
• spf (checks to see if the mail is coming from a server authorized to send mail from the sender’s stated domain, for those domains that have listed authorized servers, this cuts down on forged mail)
• checking with a current version of spamassassin to see if it’s spam or not

Still to do:

• quarantine suspected spam
• check with a virus checker (clamav) and quarantine suspected virii
• provide user access to white/blacklists, quarantine and enable/disable various filter options

I should have the spam and virus checking working this week, and hope to have the user interface done next week.

If anyone gets a reasonable amount of mail (at least several daily) and wants to be a guinea pig, let me know (preferably if you have your own domain, but there’s some value in forwarding through it as well…)!

My hosting facility is upgrading their power system to add some monitoring
capability. Unfortunately, this means that all the systems will have
to be unplugged, sometime around 7-8pm tonight. It should only be for
a few minutes, but with agora’s flaky disk, it could take a half an hour,
if the disk doesn’t fail entirely (I think that’s actually unlikely,
but…).

Sorry about the short notice — next weekend was an option, but I didn’t
want to have the possibility of major problems that might not be fixable
before I leave for England. This gives more time to resolve anything that
might turn up…