smtp settings

[kevinwoodley]

Hi,

I had problems reciving emails from actinic, so I changed the smtp server address in network settings to "localhost" since then someone has been sending 1000's of spam emails from our domain, do you think this is related to the network changes????

[Mike Hughes]

very unlikely. This is nearly always down to spammers faking the 'from' and 'return' email addresses rather than the email actually being sent from your email server.

If you look at the bounced emails you should be able to see from the header that they came from somewhere else.

Mike

[kevinwoodley]

Is there anyway of stopping it, dont really want this to carry on (not good for business)

[pinbrook]

find out if you can use SPF on your hosting.

http://www.openspf.org/Introduction

[Mike Hughes]

Does anyone know whether spf actually works? From what I can see there may be some real problems in that your PC's IP address (which is usually dynamic) will not be registered as a valid sender under the spf framework and thus any emails you send from your PC will be rejected by anyone who is implementing spf on the receiving end (such as AOL).

Or does this only apply to emails sent via a different email server to your web hosts/ISPs?

Comments?

Mike

[pinbrook]

SPF uses the domain A and MX records to check against not PC IP (the only time you need to specify IP is when you set the record up to allow mail via exchange server but in these circumstances the IP would be fixed.

you can also configure SPF to allow you to send from mail.domain etc and your ISP

[Mike Hughes]

Thanks Jo, that sounds reassuring.

1and1 don't support spf, but I've just discovered that as my domains are with 123reg I can publish the spf record there. This applies to anyone who uses 123reg and presumably other domain registrars.

Knowing I can do this and knowing what to do are two very different beasts. I'll have a read around it and report back once it's done.

Mike

[pinbrook]

v=spf1 a mx -all

This means that you are using spf version 1 and that the A and MX records for the domain are allowed to send but everyone else is not.

You can also use this if you are using your ISP's mail server to send out mail, in this case your TXT record would be something like:

v=spf1 a a:mail.isp.com mx -all

this is what i use