Well, you all know me, I don't hide the fact that security and spam is my #1 concern with any of my communities. That is why today, UGN Security (among several others) has set a ban on several major freemail portals which harbor major spammers.

Among this ban are ALL .ru addresses, hushmail, spam.com, and many, many others...

We've also put the hotmail ban back... Their spam system and system notices just don't play nice together; that and users just click the "this is spam" link in their email vs clicking "do not send me mail" option in their profile. This effects all msn, hotmail, and live.com users. Goodbye smartchild; your tyranny is over...

This isn't the first time we've had to deal with spam, prior updates:
  • RNDS - Reverse DNS on the main server IP which all mail from this server originates was not set to resolve; this was fixed a couple months ago
  • Server Security - Some of our PHP scripts were allowing users to spam the hell out of our staff, and some crafty users actually used them for other means; all where patched as soon as reports where received.
  • Insecure scripts on server where updated within minutes of security notices being sent out
  • All mail on all domains now goes through Google Apps, they have some relatively nice spam filters on board...
  • SPF Records - These records tell mail servers who is allowed to send mail from the server; where we're not set to strict, we do have records in place.


In the past, before I owned UGN, we blocked all freemail sites, as well as some major non-free mail sites (AOL anyone?) and I definitely do not want to head down that road again; however, for user security and spam prevention I am willing to do just about anything...

Questions?


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UGN Security, Back of the Web, and VNC Web Services Owner