::::: : the wood : davidrobins.com

Bounce, spammer, bounce

Technical ·Thursday April 25, 2013 @ 22:42 EDT (link)

When I was first in Florida—the weekend I interviewed at Freedom Scientific, in fact—I visited and spoke with realtor Charles McCann in downtown St. Petersburg (islandconsultinginc@gmail.com). He was friendly, although it turned out he didn't deal in the type of properties we wanted (acreage) nor location (would be across the "Sunshine Skyway" bridge); but he had signed me up for notification emails for a certain property search criteria, and we got occasional notifications*, which was fine. I even let them continue after we were fairly sure that if we were to buy a house out there, we may still be interested in something in the areas he dealt in. But after moving to Indiana, we were still getting automated mails (which was fine; how could he know), so I replied back to the (above) address, which I think was the same as on his business card, asking to be removed from the list because we had moved, and thought no more of it. But we're still getting what, now, I consider spam.

So I hit it with a big Postfix hammer: smtpd_recipient_restrictions, using check_recipient_access to reject his address via a table created by postmap. Quite convenient, even though it's not per-user. The email will be rejected by the SMTP server:

554 5.7.1 <islandconsultinginc@gmail.com>: Sender address rejected: Access denied

Usually I create a separate email address for everyone that gets my email address, unless I'm fairly confident they won't spam it (it's also good for determining who sells addresses to whom: if an email from spammer X comes from xyzcorp@domain.com, I can be pretty sure XYZCorp sold my address). But this time I didn't, probably because I didn't know if I could create the address before the first mail would arrive.

Hopefully Chuck, or his automated system, will get the message.

* The mails really were only occasional, most of the time, versus now where sometimes we get several updates a day for our Indiana search (from realtor F. C. Tucker), I suppose because prices etc. change a lot in the search we gave our realtor. This is fine: I asked for them, and I trust they will stop if requested.