Topic: Junk mail has stopped

[robw]

This may well seem like a dream and not a problem but we have a domain that gets quite a bit of spam. Over the past two or three days, we appear to have had a drastic reduction in this mail to almost zero. We are also missing a few (but not all) genuine emails that have come from outside and the senders are getting failures.

We have a SME 7.0 RC2 (patched to RC3) server. I have checked the Spam settings on the server and they are turned off. I've looked in the users' junkmail folders and there is nothing there. When I look back through the mail logs, junk mail appears to be arriving (from my EXTREMELY limited understanding). It just doesn't appear in the users' mail boxes.

I have sent numerous test emails from seven different outside accounts with/without body text, attachments, subjects... All have arrived at the user's inbox in a timely manner.

I'm just worried that if the spam is being rejected, other email that is wanted is also going missing.

[dmajwool]

Could your ISP have changed its spam policy?  You could try sending a spammy mail to your domain from outside and see if that gets through?
HTH, David

[gmphoto]

Could your ISP have changed its spam policy?  You could try sending a spammy mail to your domain from outside and see if that gets through?
HTH, David

Or maybe try sending a gtube attachment to your mail accounts and see if it is filtered.

[raem]

robw

Did you inadvertantly enable RBL's ?

Check messages being rejected in /var/log/qpsmtpd/current

[mmccarn]

Here are a few things you may want to look at:

• If you have your "Spam Sensitivity" set to "Custom", and have a "Custom spam rejection level" set, then many emails may be rejected by qpsmtpd with no chance to get to the user's junkmail folder.  Spam is not rejected by default.
  
• If you have the "check_earlytalker" plugin turned on then qpsmtpd will reject many connections outright for mis-handling SMTP and trying to start delivering a message before your server says "OK".  This plugin is "on" by default.
• If you have the "check_basicheaders" plugin turned on then qpsmtpd will reject any email from a server that does not include To:, From:, Date:, and Subject:.  This plugin is "on" by default.
• qpsmtpd is intentionally designed to reject as much email as possible before your server accepts it, and usually does an excellent job, too!

The details of what is causing your problems are in /var/log/qpsmtpd/@* and /var/log/qpsmtpd/current.  If you search these logfiles for all lines containing the word "DENY" (or "DENYSOFT", but this will be included if you search on "DENY"...) you should get some idea which plugin is rejecting your email...

If you don't find any info in your qpsmtpd logs about "DENY" then you may need to check (and change) the qpsmtpd "LogLevel" setting:

Check Current LogLevel (default was originally 8, then was reduced to 6 to reduce qpsmtpd log file size, then was increased back to 8 in order to include DENY & DENYSOFT messages):
# config getprop qpsmtpd LogLevel

Set LogLevel high enough to include "DENY" messages:
# config setprop qpsmtpd LogLevel 8

If you change the LogLevel you'll need to restart qpsmtpd:
# service qpsmtpd restart

And you may also need to restart the qpsmtpd multilog process:
# kill -sigterm cat /var/service/qpsmtpd/log/supervise/pid

[robw]

Everyone, thankyou so much for the replies. Junk mail has started again with no config change from me so I think it may be to do with the ISP. I checked all the other settings and they are as suggested but with no junk mail filtering so, seeing we now have junk mail back, I think I'll turn this feature on.

Thanks again, the replies really helped me understand heaps more about how email is being handled.