Spamassassin blocking mails

Spamassassin blocking mails

[David Frascone]

This is likely affecting more than just me.

-Dave


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tiger Technologies <support@tigertech.net>
Date: Tue, Jun 16, 2015 at 10:57 AM
Subject: Re: ezmlm warning [TT#: 1685493]
To: David Frascone <dave@frascone.com>
Cc: cygwin-help@cygwin.com


David Frascone <dave@frascone.com> wrote:

>It looks like your mail server is being flagged by spam assassin -- that is
>probably affecting all of your users who use blacklists, not just me.
>
>I'm cc-ing my ISP to see if they have any suggestions.

Thank you for writing!

We've looked at why that message was rejected, and it's not because of a
problem with the cygwin.com server. Rather, it's because of the server
that sent the message to cygwin.com, "mail3.ks.pochta.ru".

The original message had these headers (among others):

 Received: from mail3.ks.pochta.ru (HELO mail3.ks.pochta.ru)
(185.79.118.173) by sourceware.org (qpsmtpd/0.93/v0.84-503-g423c35a)
with (AES256-SHA encrypted) ESMTPS; Thu, 04 Jun 2015 09:52:10 +0000
 From: Mikhail Usenko <mikeus@nm.ru>
 To: cygwin@cygwin.com
 X-RSpam-Report: This message is probably spam.

The mail3.ks.pochta.ru server at 185.79.118.173 is on many blacklists:

 http://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=blacklist%3a185.79.118.173&run=toolpage

So it's likely that many (most?) ISPs treated this individual message as
spam. (Even the cygwin.com server seems to have flagged it as "This
message is probably spam".) The sender, mikeus@nm.ru, is almost
certainly aware that many people aren't getting his messages.

However, this shouldn't affect other cygwin.com list messages. If we're
understanding correctly, the warning that dave@frascone.com received
from the cygwin.com server was just about that individual message. Our
logs show that all other messages from cygwin.com to dave@frascone.com
over the last 30 days have been delivered normally.

This re-conjures the age-old debate about whether list servers should
accept and forward mail that they think is probably spam (and whether
they should notify subscribers about bounces of those messages if they
do). There's no right answer to that, unfortunately.

Our customers can avoid this particular problem by adding the list
server's "Return-Path" domain name to their e-mail whitelist settings
(<https://support.tigertech.net/bypass-filter>), which we've done for
messages from cygwin.com to frascone.com -- they won't be scanned by
SpamAssassin anymore.

We hope that helps. Please let us know if not, or if there is anything
else we can do. Thank you again!

--
Robert Mathews, Tiger Technologies

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