[PLUG] Open relays for spammers

Jim Adams JimAdams at VibrantLogic.com
Fri Jul 26 06:34:16 UTC 2002


On Thu, 2002-07-25 at 23:26, Jeme A Brelin wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 25 Jul 2002, Jim Adams wrote:
> > I had to ask around before I found out that in order to turn off open
> > relay you have to restrict relay capabilities to your location range
> > in a config file.  This seems like a rather roundabout way of doing it
> > IMHO, and it's not well documented that this is the correct way to
> > turn relay off.
> 
> How ELSE would you do it?

I suppose you're right, it does make sense that restricting "relay"
turns off "open relay".  It just didn't seem intuitive that when you
told it authenticate smtp clients it would still be an open relay server
because relay was set to allow 0.0.0.0.  

Also as I mentioned before no where in the documentation did it say
"Warning: By default this server is open relay, to turn it off do..." 
This comes back to the original question of "why are there so many open
relay servers?"  In this case it could be a combination of poor docs and
slackerish(is that a word) admins.

> 
> What we call an "open relay" is just a system that relays mail regardless
> of source.  Unless you specify somewhere the systems to which you'd like
> to restrict relay capabilities, you're on open relay.  If the system
> DOESN'T allow relay from some sources, then it is just a local mail
> agent... what good is that on the internet?
> 
> J.
> -- 
>    -----------------
>      Jeme A Brelin
>     jeme at brelin.net
>    -----------------
>  [cc] counter-copyright
>  http://www.openlaw.org
> 
> 
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