VPOP3 Hints n Tips

Say goodbye to SPAM forever With VPOP3!

Sat, 17 May 2008 14:00:48 GMT

Here's how we handle spam in our office using VPOP3.

This approach may not be for you but for us it proves to be very effective and more importantly for us, it's now like SPAM doesn't even exist.

Even though VPOP3 has an excellent quarantine facility, we found that it was a drag going through the quarantine summary for false positives every day.

Yes it only takes a few minutes but the whole process from opening the Quarantine Summary e-mail, enabling links within Outlook, scanning the messages for false positives - it's just another chore that we don't need to do these days. It ends up taking about 5 minutes which could be used much more productively doing something else. Plus, there's a non obvious bad energy there that the existence of SPAM, and having to battle it every day, adds to our lives.

So we used some statistical data to create an overall policy for SPAM handling in our office.

This is what we found... (ballpark figures).

We'd get about 2,000 SPAMS per day.

Of these SPAMS, we'd get 1 to 3 false positives.

False positives about 99.9% of the time had a spam score of between 100 and 200. We only have ever found 3 false positives in the past 6 months with SPAM scores above 200.

Of all the SPAM e-mail about 3% of SPAMs have a score of between 100 and 200.

So using these statistics, this is how we handle SPAM.

1. SMTP In with Greylisting - This kills about 90% of the SPAM before it even has a chance to get into our office. So this reduces the number of SPAM messages from 2000 to 200.

2. We relax the SPAM score from 100 to 200. So only if an e-mail scores above 200 is it considered SPAM. 99.99% of anything that would have been quarantined as a false positive now gets past the spam filters.

3. Since around 3% of real SPAM scores between 100 and 200, this may allow 6 SPAM messages per day to get through. Amongst 5 mailboxes this is around 1 message per day per mailbox.

4. Anything scores above 200 gets redirected to no-one. So basically it gets deleted and disappears into oblivion since it is a 99.99% certainty that it is SPAM.

So with 5 mailboxes we are saving about 25 minutes per day not having to go through the quarantine for each mailbox for false positives.

Each mailbox will statistically get 1 SPAM per day coming through to their inbox. It takes about 5 seconds to see that it is SPAM and delete it.

Pretty much no false positives exist. Anything legitimate that was intended for you will come through to you since the spam score has been relaxed to 200.

With our volume of e-mail abut 5 to 8 legitimate e-mails will go missing per year. We figure if they were that important the sender will follow up anyway via another means or another e-mail.

So...the benefits for us are these:

1. We save between 100 and 150 hours per year checking quarantine for false positives.
2. For all this time (and money) saving we may miss 5 to 8 legitimate e-mails per year. (most of which will be followed up on by the sender anyway)
3. Everything else that is legitimate gets through.
4. We never have to see any offensive subject lines that are processed subliminally by our brains ever again.
5. SPAM is no longer a battle for us at all any more.
6. SPAM (and its negative energy) no longer exist in our office and it's amazing the change it makes to the energy of e-mail. It's almost like "Feng Shui" for e-mail.

Thanks Paul Smith and VPOP3 for making our world a better place!!

filter non users/mappings

Mon, 05 May 2008 10:07:17 GMT

Hello,
I'am getting 10 messages for non-users every minute.
Is it possible to let through onlys the messages that are directed to mapped addresses and defined users?
Gr. Frank Poot
frank@themag.nl

Use Instant Messaging for Rooms

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 13:32:56 GMT

We have a customer who are Vetinarians, they want to setup 15 users on Vpop3, but want to use the Instant Messaging" largely on a basis of the various rooms. eg a message from the reception to a vet in "consulting room 1". Our thoughts are to setup the 15 users, then an extra 6 for the rooms, we could perhaps do with then not having email, just IM (is this possible?).
All in all not an elegant solution, anyone got any other ideas?

Lots of messages

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 09:41:18 GMT

I'm finding that the messages are getting a little irritating.

Is there any way of making vpop a little less verbose.

I and my users don't need to know about failed or timed out connections, but I can't see how to disable these messages.

And is there any way of quarantining spam without sending a summary of the contents. Over the past few months, we've only ever had a couple of "lost" genuine emails, which I've found easily enough, but people find the summary message nearly as annoying as the spam that's in it.

I can't find answers in the knowledge base, but that might be because they're not obvious key words...

Disk Full connection aborted?!

Fri, 18 May 2007 08:45:01 GMT

Having run Vpop3 for 5 years virtually problem free I recently upgraded to 2.4.0b

It's worked fine for a week or two, but now nobody can send emails! User side the error displayed depends on client used - outlook instantly gives "undeliverable, no transport provider was available for delivery to this recipient". Firefox doesn't even attempt to send, just says

"The size of the message you are trying to send exceeds a temporary size limit of the server, try to reduce the message size... ...The server responded 4.3.1 insufficient disk space to send mail."

that's on an email that just says "test" so couldn't really get any smaller.

Looking in the admin section as soon as you hit connect now in the server status it repsonds "no disk space - pop download aborted".

I've contacted the ISP who have assured me all is fine their end, they also set up a test account directly in and out of our account and can use it fine?!

Help!!!!!!

alternative outmail

Thu, 26 Apr 2007 07:48:08 GMT

Hi,

I had to set an alternative outmail for a specified domain. (The ISP's server had problems delivering to this specific domain.)

So, I wanted to set
Outmail1 -> via SMTP relay (ISP's mail server)
Outmail2 (diffdomain.com) -> directly to their server

So I created a new connection and a new outmail. Set "diffdomain.com" for the Domain Filtering.
I modified the Domain Filtering of the original Outmail setting and added "!diffdomain.com".
But it is not enoguh! You also have to add "*" in the original domain filtering, once you added an exclusion. So it look like the following:

Code:


*
!diffdomain.com

Although this is documented in the help:

Quote:

If you do not have any email domains filtering the To address, then VPOP3 will allow sending to any address, but if you have any To filters, VPOP3 will not allow sending to any other addresses

But it was not obvious for me, at first. (Had to look through help again.)

So perhaps this topic will save a few minutes in the future for someone. (Or for me, next time. )

Regards, Andras

Alternate Autoresponder setup (web based)

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 15:15:07 GMT

Attached is a single aspx (asp.net) page that can be deployed on an intranet to allow users to set their autoresponder on their vpop account. We found that users did not use the webmail setup of these and us poor admins were tired of requests to set them up. Here is the result, now almost all our users set an autoresponder for their absences. The attached zip file contains the aspx page (with setup information commented into it), a css file and a screenshot of how the page looks.

Feel free to use/butcher for your own use - note the usage disclaimer and requirements in the AutoResponder.aspx file. Please post back to this thread with questions, suggestions etc.

cheers

Markt

Unauthorised POP/SMTP access - user locked out?

Sun, 28 Jan 2007 19:40:24 GMT

One of our VPOP3 installations has today developed a problem where one users account repeatedly goes into the "locked out" status. (presumably triggered after 3 invalid logon attempts)

As we allow outside access to POP and SMTP to this user it sounds like an attempt to connect by an unauthorised user, uing the users name but invalid password, thus triggering the "3 attempts then lockout for 30mins".

I have looked at the VPOP3 logs to see if there are unexpected attempts to login, without finding anything other the the valid users logons. (POP3SVR.LOG, SMTPSVR.LOG ?) I have also run ETHEREAL to monitor the network, and not seeing invalid attempts to log on either thro POP3/port110 or SMTP/port25. (not tried 5108 yet... maybe this is it?)

I cant see what could be causing this problem..
(1) Are there any specific logs to help identify invalid logon attempts?
(2) Presume the unauthorised logon attempts could be coming in over HHTP/port5108 also? Assume this will also increment the "account-lock after 3 failed logons" counter
(3) Any other suggestions as to what could be causing this?
(4) Any other suggestions for where to look or tools to use to try to find the cause of this?

Send E-Mail Faster

Sat, 06 May 2006 12:46:17 GMT

While I am not sure of the implications of this with regard to individual ISPs and possible overloading of their SMTP server (and or whether they would be happy about it) - here is what I do to send e-mail at around 200%+ of the normal SMTP relay method.

I select send using SMTP direct and under DNS overrides use the wildcard *.* and select our server's SMTP server. This sends ALL e-mails to the SMTP server and since I use 25 threads it uses 25 threads to spool the outbound e-mails to the server.

We are fortunate enough to have our own dedicated server and it gladly accepts the e-mails coming through at this rapid rate without any significant increase in server load nor any timeout or socket errors. It provides the benefit of being able to spool outbound using multiple threads and using SMTP direct without having to deal with individual ISP's (such as AOL) rejecting mail originating from non-static IP's (or statis IP's using broadband). As an FYI our PTR records are in full compliance of the standards with our static IP listed but we still get AOL rejection of our e-mail we send using SMTP direct without the DNS override.

In testing the speed comparison of using this method I sent 1000 X 1Kb e-mails in 2 minutes. While in 2 minutes regular SMTP relay only sent 430 messages. That's a 230% increase. This was done on a T1 speed equivalent at 1.5 Mbps.

So there's clearly a significant speed increase. I may have to test with using even more threads and see if the performance increases even more.