Tag Archives: spam

Fake MDaemon – Critical Patch Update

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There are reports going around of a Critical Patch Update spoof email being sent that include download links and claims to be from MDaemon Support using the email sender address [email protected].

As a reminder, always check the “From” address sending domain to ensure it is mdaemon.com. While I’m not one to tell you what to do and I’m very likely not your boss, emails from unusual addresses are spoofed messages and should be ignored and you absolutely should not follow the links or install whatever this spoof is providing.

How harmful is spam?

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I often hear comments like “it’s no big deal”, and “just hit delete” while obsessing over tracking down and blocking spammers.

I stumbled across an interesting perspective that I wanted to share:

I think it’s worth noting that the largest cost of spam (and other forms of Internet-borne abuse) is not financial.

It’s time — irreplaceable, precious time. Do the math: construct an estimate for how many seconds it takes someone to realize that a message is spam and Just Hit Delete (TM); now multiply by all the someones doing that for the same spam message; now multiply by all the spam messages send in a day or a week or a year.

Then divide by the average human lifespan. The results are disturbing.

Luckily, MDaemon includes many tools that help you combat spam. Life’s too short to waste on deleting garbage that shouldn’t exist in the first place.

Use Host Screening to quickly block abuse

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One of the advantages of running my own MDaemon server is that I keep an eye on a lot of the spam and abuse that’s floating around on the internet.

Over the years I’ve put together a list of EHLO strings that can be used by MDaemon’s host screening tool to block inbound connections. Most of these are invalid based on their syntax, but yet are hitting a reasonable number of spam delivery attempts. Find the HostScreen.dat file \MDaemon\App directory and add the following:

all localhost refuse
all user refuse
all friend refuse
all -* refuse
all *_* refuse
all #.#.#.# refuse
all *.invalid refuse
all *# refuse
all */* refuse
all *|* refuse
all ylmf-pc refuse

Save the file, and then create a “hostscreen.sem” in the \MDaemon\App directory to reload the contents of the HostScreen.dat file.

If you haven’t used MDaemon’s semaphore (SEM) files before, the following command will do it:

echo. > C:\MDaemon\App\hostscreen.sem

I have yet to observe any false positives, although it’s not impossible, so watch your logs if you’re worried.

I do periodically update this list, and if anyone has any entries to contribute, please do so in the comments. When the post is updated, it will be promoted to the top of the list, but generally no email notifications will be sent.