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Steve VanDevender
stevev@darkwing.uoregon.edu
The Computing Center recently negotiated a campus-wide subscription to the Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS) RBL+ service, which combines the RBL, RSS, and DUL into one single list. We are now also mirroring the RBL+ zone file on our own name servers, which will improve performance and reliability, and weÕve configured our mail servers that were previously using the separate MAPS anti-spam blacklists to use the RBL+ instead.
Because MAPS LLC is ending general free access to its RBL, RSS, and DUL spam-blocking DNS blacklists, you should remove the configuration items for querying blackholes.mail-abuse.org (RBL), relays.mail-abuse.org (RSS), or dialups.mail-abuse.org (DUL).These have caused problems for our PMDF mail system on OREGON, and they may cause problems for UNIX-based mailers as well.
If you are using Sendmail on a UNIX host within the UO network (128.223.0.l0/16) and want to use the RBL+ for spam blocking, your mail server should use phloem.uoregon.edu (128.223.32.35) or ruminant.uoregon.edu (128.223.60.22) as the first listed name server in /etc/resolv.conf. Then, for Sendmail 8.10 or later, add this line to your .mc configuration template:
FEATURE(dnsbl, `rbl-plus.mail-abuse.org',
`"MAPS-listed host:
http://mail-abuse.org/cgi-bin/lookup?"$&{client_addr}')dnl
If you have Sendmail 8.9, replace "FEATURE(dnsbl, ...)" with "FEATURE(rbl, ...)". Once you rebuild your sendmail.cf, install it, and restart sendmail, you will then be able to query the RBL+ blacklist.
For a description of how to use the RBL with Sendmail and other mail server
software, see
http://www.mail-abuse.org/rbl/usage.html
(Note that you should replace "blackholes.mail-abuse.org" in their examples with "rbl-plus.mail-abuse.org")
It is also possible to distinguish RBL, RSS, and DUL-listed hosts by the IP address returned from an RBL+ query, if you believe it is desirable to do so and are willing to do the fancy Sendmail hacking.
If your mail server does not reside in the 128.223.0.0/16 address space, you will be unable to query our copy of the RBL+ blacklist. This is a contractual requirement of our subscription. If you are running a personal mail server, you may be able to negotiate your own contract with MAPS at no charge for query access to the RBL+, RBL, RSS, or DUL. See http://www.mail-abuse.org/feestructure.html for details.