Solved: Incoming Relay configuration for fallback MX

wsandkuyl · ‎06-06-2009

Hello Community,

We've recently deployed a Cisco Spam & Virus Blocker in our network. Currently we're sending a good amount of email traffic to it (~10k emails / hour), all seems to be going very well.

For redundancy all our domains are configured with two MX records:

MX10: (the cisco blocker)

MX100: (a seperate fallback server)

The MX10 normally grabs all the email, but some spammers tend to send email directly to the MX100 (our fallback server), which then forwards it to the Cisco Blocker. I've configured our MX100 as an Incoming Relay, with the following details:

Name: fallback

IP: (the IP of the server)

Header: Received

Parse After: from

Hops: 1

I'm hoping for some input on wether this is the correct setup, as I don't want my fallback server to get a negative reputation score in SenderBase for obvious reasons.

The fallback server is not between any firewalls, and relays mail directly to the Cisco Blocker once it's received.

Thanks for any input!

edgar.reinke · ‎06-14-2009

Does your Fallback Server use the same IP-Address to receive and to deliver e-mails? If it does of course you run the risk to lower the SBRS, because the Blocker tracks the IP Source Address of the incoming SMTP session to get a) the SBRS Score via DNS and b) to bind some statistics and reports them to SenderBase.

Edgar

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jsteer · ‎06-15-2009

Is it working yet as hoped? Depending on the MTA & headers this does vary some what and can take some trial & error to get working.

Your config look correct from a first glance - however from experience mail server configurations can vary hugely.

jason

View solution in original post

edgar.reinke · ‎06-14-2009

Does your Fallback Server use the same IP-Address to receive and to deliver e-mails? If it does of course you run the risk to lower the SBRS, because the Blocker tracks the IP Source Address of the incoming SMTP session to get a) the SBRS Score via DNS and b) to bind some statistics and reports them to SenderBase.

Edgar

jsteer · ‎06-15-2009

Is it working yet as hoped? Depending on the MTA & headers this does vary some what and can take some trial & error to get working.

Your config look correct from a first glance - however from experience mail server configurations can vary hugely.

jason

wsandkuyl · ‎06-15-2009

Hello Jason,

Yes, from the looks of it it works as it should. I've reviewed various mails through Message Tracking, all mail flowing through the fallback MX seems to be tagged as such, and the fallback MX reputation at SenderBase is still marked as "Good" eventhough the Blocker received roughly 100.000 spam emails from it in the past week.

Thanks for checking up on it!