Does my machine send spam???

[Karl Auer]

On Mon, 2016-10-17 at 14:07 +0200, Volker Wysk wrote:
> What should I do with those delivery failure emails that I get?
> Should I delete the affected "from" mail address?

The best way to not get spam is to not have an email address :-)

Deleting an address that gets a lot of spam is a very good idea.
However, it's the "nuclear option", and not much use if you have an
address that you want (or need) to keep.

> I could also filter them out.

Most mailers have a spam marker. If yours does, just mark received spam
to help your mail client learn about it, and more spam will end up
automatically classified correctly and dropped in your spam box. Then
check your spam box once a week or so, just in case some good emails
got misclassified.

Since you are running your own email server, you could consider
installing one of the many spam killers such as spamassassin. These
also learn from marked spam, and get better with time. However, all
filters take a lot of care and feeding.

Alternatively, and especially if you manage only a few accounts, you
could subscribe to a mailwashing service. For a few dollars a month per
address, they will do all the hard work, delivering a clean stream of
email to your server. They usually have whitelisting, blacklisting and
quarantine features, so you can permit or block certain senders, and
manually forward any messages that get misclassified.

Mailwashing services work via your MX record. You set the MX record for
your domain to point to the mailwasher's mailservers. They receive any
email addressed to you, drop or quarantine spam and malware, then
deliver the rest directly to your server. You configure your server to
accept connections only from the mailwasher, and the end result is that
you will see very little spam. Changing mailwashing services - or
reverting to direct delivery to your own servers - is as easy as
changing your MX records.

Regards, K.

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer
http://twitter.com/kauer389

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