36: The Thirty Ton Replacement
As sort-of expected, the last chapter of Run Your Own Mail Server is getting split into tech detritus and social detritus. I’ll probably split this into two chapters.
Spambots all choose shortcuts. Postscreen catches many of them. Greylisting plays against others. A popular shortcut many spambots choose is to ignore backup MX records. These spambots attempt to contact the target’s primary MX, but if that fails they proceed to the next victim.
Remember, the SMTP protocol comes from an age when “high availability” meant buying expensive machines and “virtualization” meant hosting more…
The skinny
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