Defending Your Mail Server?

soren42 asks: "I've been a casualty of war in the latest round of SoBig battles. Apparently, some of my user's e-mail addresses were in the address books of infected Outlook clients, and spam is now being circulated appearing to come from my domain. I'm getting almost 50 'Message Undeliverable' errors per hour, and I think I've been blacklisted from AOL and Earthlink. I know there are plenty of you are having this problem - how are you dealing with it?" Email viruses, once urban legends, have now become a real threat to certain people. What active measures can users (both vulnerable and non-vulnerable to such things) take to lower the propagation rate of such viruses across the internet?

Comments

Fucking Spammers

[Goo.cc]

The usefulness of E-Mail is slowly being destroyed by Spammers. There has been a few times now that I couldn't either send or receive an e-mail because of blackholes and I get more spam everyday. Is there anything new on the horizon to prevent spam? Laws, Filters, Blackholes, and Whitelists seem unable to do anything about this problem.

Maybe we should just start suing the companies that use Spammers. (Some will deny knowledge of any spamming but ignorance of who is doing your advertising is no excuse IMO.)

Re:Do not use Outlook, etc.

[Matts]

This is a common misconception by geeks who are smug because they didn't get infected with Sobig.

Sobig didn't use any exploits. It was just a plain old .EXE attached to an email. Outlook prompted the user when they tried to run it telling them that exes often contain viruses. But they still ran it.

This behaviour is the same in Thunderbird and other windows mail clients. It's even the same in Apple's Mail.app.

Don't be a bigot and assume you're immune because you don't run Outlook.