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Continue Reading 241 comments February 23rd, 2006

Postini Spam Filtering

Like many of you who host your own email server I’ve noticed a drastic increase in the amount of spam I’ve been receiving as of late. Yes, of course I run a spam/virus checker (Spamassassin/MailScanner). Yes, I also block certain ⿿problematic” netblocks and use RBL lists. Did all of this work? Well, sort of. For it to really work acceptably it required a fair amount of server administration time on my part and as someone I know is fond of saying; “Life’s just too short for that sort of thing.”

A good friend of mine is a reseller for a mail filtering company called Postini. You may or may not have heard of them however they are regarded by some as the king of the hill of the spam filtering world. I cried on his shoulder for a while about the glut of e-turds bouncing off my server every day and the few crashes that have resulted because of it. He took pity on me and told me he’d give me a couple of months to give his service a try and I, on an impulse, decided to give it a shot.

Here’s a little background on me; I’m a hands on guy. I don’t like outsourcing something as important as email to anyone. The thought of another company being a link in my email chain would usually be enough to keep my up at night. Recent events had however completely eroded my can-do attitude. I was at the breaking point and I couldn’t deal with more missing email or a downed server.

So I bit the bullet and set my primary domain up with Postini MX records and waited. I used their control panel to add a couple of domains to my white list but that was pretty much all the intervention on my part. Slowly the spam dropped off as DNS caches started running dry. By the next day the problem had pretty much vanished. Every time I hit send and receive I was rewarded by either no mail or mail that I wanted. It was beautiful.

I then decided to explore the Postini control panel. They have a MRTG-style graph that shows how many emails have hit the server and whether they were delivered, quarantined, chucked etc. It was fairly interesting. I could run reports and see exactly what percentage of email was being delivered. My percentage was a meager 2% by the way. I could browse the quarantine section and see what the software had tagged as spam. It all was. I could also change settings for how aggressively the system treated certain categories of junk mail. Among the options are “Sexually Explicit,” “Get Rich Quick,” “Special Offers” and “Racially Insensitive.”

If Postini does have a weak link it is the system administrator control panel. Mind you, the user control panel is fine. It’s very simple and easy for the average user to add domains to the approved or blocked senders list. When you, as a reseller or web host, want to add new email accounts or domain to the system things become a little more complicated. I really wish that companies with quality software products would spend a little more time on their web interfaces. If the system administration interface had help files and a more intuitive structure I wouldn’t hesitate to give this product 5 out of 5. Fortunately once you get the hang of it it’s not too bad.

All in all this is a fantastic product that I can’t recommend enough to those drowning in spam. I’ve since put all the email accounts on my mail server on Postini and my server loads have dropped substantially. By configuring the firewall on my mail server to only accept connections on port 25 from Postini’s mail servers I’ve also closed the door on the crafty spammer who ignores MX records and connects directly with your mail server to do their dirty business.

Rating: 4/5
URL: www.postini.com
Reseller URL: www.opendoors.com

214 comments February 23rd, 2006

UltraDNS SiteBacker

If you have a domain that absolutely must be up 24×7 you know how important your DNS setup is. If your DNS is down you’re not getting hits, not getting email and in a lot of cases, not getting paid. I myself have experienced the pain of a non-responsive DNS setup and it spurred me to kick my name server setup up a notch.

My DNS problem was a classic example of Murphy’s Law. For the longest time I was running a secondary server on a VPS (virtual private server) which was located across the country from my main DNS server. It was running BIND and configured to act as a slave to my primary server which was pulling double duty as a web and mail server. Anyway, besides being a bit on the pokey side, it worked fine.

Fast forward to about six months ago. My phone starts ringing and I’ve got people telling me that a web application I host isn’t working anymore. Hm, the server must be down. I try to log on and get the obligatory 404 finger. I try to log into a Linux box via SSH using the system IP address and guess what, I get right in. This gets me thinking. I pull up a DOS prompt and, using the very handy nslookup utility, try to query my DNS server. Nothing. I try my backup server. Also nothing. Queue panic.

Well, my primary DNS server came back up with a simple reboot. The mail server had become choked with spam and Spamassassin and/or Mailscanner had taken the box down. But where was my trusty backup DNS server when all this was going down? Well, my VPS company had quietly gone out of business a few days before and taken my secondary name server with them. Perfect.

This left me with a choice; I could either get another VPS (which I hadn’t really been too jazzed on) or lease a low-end dedicated server and just run DNS and maybe a backup mail server on it. I then remembered the fancy DNS service providers I’d looked at in the past and thought I’d give them a second look.

After a bit of looking I decided on UltraDNS’s product, SiteBacker. It basically acts as a secondary (and tertiary) name server by accepting zone transfers from your DNS server. The price was right (around $15 per month) and after making a couple of changes to my DNS server I was in business.

Pros
The pros of this service are its simple setup, the fact that it automatically updates itself, the affordable pricing and the tech support. I’ve submitted a couple of tickets and they’ve been quickly answered by people not using “hax0r” speak. The DNS servers themselves are fast which is nice. It seems solid too. I haven’t noticed any outages. There’s a report section in the control panel which shows how many queries they’re fielding for you which is moderately interesting.

Cons
The downside is the lame control panel and the lack of documentation. If I didn’t already know how to set BIND up to do what it needed to do I would have been at a loss. They really need to add a few tutorials to the web interface to help those with setup questions. It was challenging for me to find a few bits of info that I really needed and it was a bit frustrating that I had to dig so hard to get them. The web interface also looks pretty dated which is kind of a turn-off. Who doesn’t like pretty things and the monochromatic blue interface doesn’t help me know where to spastically click at two in the morning to add a domain.

The other major con is that they make you sign a one-year agreement.  In the managed service industry one-year contracts are becoming a thing of the past and UltraDNS really should consider dropping this requirement on their lower-end product line.

All in all I recommend this service for those who run a name server and are looking to add some quality redundancy without adding another server to their management headache.  I just wish they didn’t make you sign your life away for a full year.

 Update: 7/10/2007

I guss UltraDNS was purchased by NeuStar.  Not much has changed.  Same pricing, same crappy backend.  I’d recomend moving to another provider like DNS Made Easy at this point.  The pricing and functionality is better however DNS Made Easy’s backend, like NeuStar’s is no treat for the eyes, or brain at 2am.

Rating: 3/5
URL:  www.sitebacker.com

292 comments February 23rd, 2006