Over the last couple of months I have been struggling to deal with an increased level of SPAM. I run my own mail server (Debian, Postfix, Courier, ClamAV, SpamAssasin).
About 2 months ago my server was hacked, at that time all I could find in terms of malicious damage was that the root password had been changed and all the other users had been removed from the sudo’ers list.
Since then I have been having great difficulty with the email side of the server, it always seems to have a large number of mails in the main queue, genuine emails are getting spammed (but only on specific addresses), both the volume of SPAM recieved and the amount of SPAM delivered as genuine mail has increased dramatically.
Take Saturday morning for example. I checked my email at around 7:30am and left all mailboxes with no uunread messages, deleting any spam and clearing them up. I then went to one of our properties to do some work and checked my email at around 9:30 and there were 21,000 emails that had been delivered to that mailbox.
My poor HTC Touch could not cope with that volume of emails and while trying to clear those emails it died, since that the phone has not been right, randomly re-booting even thought I have done a hard reset.
It has also come to my attention that emails from some of the feedback and contact forms on my websites are getting spammed and as such the customers for my plugins especially are unable to get support.
There is clearly something wrong with the configuration of SpamAssasin somewhere, but what is the big question. I am tempted to setup a temporary VPS and create a new MX server on that so that I can compare the setup, even move some of the mailboxes across to that, although I would not want that as a permanent solution as I have a high powered dedicated server which I would rather keep as my main server.
It has been said before that the few kill the internet for the rest of us, my server currently handles around 250,000 emails per week, with maybe 1000 of those genuine. The wasted server power and resources costs business a huge amount of money. I am not sure what to do about this, my most immediate action is to try and find out why emails from my feedback and contact forms are being spammed, perhaps I need to add some more headers to the php email.
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