[ale] Monitoring outgoing emails on Postfix, filtering incoming bounce back messages

Jay Loden ale at jayloden.com
Mon Jun 25 18:05:38 EDT 2007


I've been getting a LOT of bounce back messages from mails I didn't send, and I think someone's found my email address and started spamming with my address. Pulling a 'joe job' on me as it were. It's causing me to get dozens of out of office replies, receipt failures, and "illegal content" bounces in my inbox. :(

First and foremost, I'd like to make doubly sure that nothing is going out of my server that I did not send (there are only two users using my server for sending mail). Can anyone provide a quick way I can get visibility into outgoing messages from my postfix mail server? I was thinking even just a tail -f on the mail.log file piped through an appropriate grep would be fine, or tcpdump, etc. but I couldn't think of what to grep for. Any suggestions? I just want to get a rough idea of what and how much is going out of my mail server.

On a related topic, any better suggestions on how to filter out all these annoying bounce messages? I set up a couple procmail rules for the time being but it'd be nice if there was a less complex/difficult to maintain method. I do have spamassassin running and filtering a lot of spam, and I use Thunderbird's junk filter, but since these aren't actually spam per se, they're not getting filtered well (if at all). 

Thanks, 

-Jay



More information about the Ale mailing list