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FairUCE - the Smart Email Proxy

Posted by michael on from the can't-hurt dept.

Jestrzcap writes "This just posted on Freshmeat: FairUCE (which stands for 'Fair use of Unsolicited Commercial Email') is an SMTP proxy, running between multiple instances of Postfix, that verifies email by attempting to verify the sender through lookups (a user customized challenge/response). It claims to be able to 'stop a vast majority of spam' without the need for content filters, and 'virtually eliminates spoofed addresses, phishing, and even many viruses with a few cached DNS look-ups and a couple of if/then statements'."

3 of 333 comments (clear)

  1. Oh crap.... by Justice8096 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've already had problems getting email from my government coworkers with spam validators like this. The military really doesn't like broadcasting who their email servers are... So they regularly get sent to Junk Mail.

  2. forward and reverse by gonaddespammed.com · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If MTA's on the Internet required the forward and reverse DNS lookups to match ~70% of spam (and viruses) would disappear. This requires ISP's to correcty configure their DNS, which unfortunately doesn't happen because people are lazy.

  3. Re:Challenge Response Spam by farnz · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I'd be interested to know which blacklists are by domain, not by sending IP address; I find that SpamAssassin's use of SPEWS and Spamhaus blacklists is enough to catch virtually all the spam I get, and both of those blacklists are done via sender IP, not by domain name.

    So, I'd disagree with your conclusion that blacklisting doesn't work; if a spammer can use one of your IP addresses to spam, then you need to fix up your system to be more secure. A quick browse of mail logs will show any unexpected outgoing e-mail, and you can always feed your mailserver IP to spews.org and see if they list you (they're one of the most aggressive listing places).

    If it's not coming from one of your IP addresses, then it doesn't affect mail sent from your domain, only from the spammer's IP addresses. Hence there is no fallout on you unless I use an aggressive list like SPEWS, and you are being blocked because your ISP hosts spammers himself.

    --
    I appear to have a blog. Odd.