In case you missed the news, Windows Server 2008 R2 became generally available on October 22. Good news for early adopters: ORF 4.3 + Exchange 2007 2010 works wonderfully on 2008 R2, so if you plan upgrading, ORF 4.3 will be there for you. To recap, the Exchange 2010 RC is supported by a patch and ORF 5 will support the entire line of Windows Servers (up to 2008 R2) in IIS SMTP-only mode as well.
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We started to receive reports of Blackholes.us blocking all incoming emails.
This DNS Blacklist does not operate for some time now: the IP address space that they used for name servers now belongs to another, unrelated entity. Since many email administrators forgot to disable Blackholes.us in their anti-spam applications, the new owner continued to receive a huge amount of DNS queries. Due to this, they decided to return a 127.0.0.2 response for all queries, which means if you have Blackholes.us enabled, all incoming email will be rejected. (Similar thing happened to ORDB a while back)
To solve this, you should disable and/or remove Blackholes.us from your DNS Blacklist definition set (ORF Administration Tool: Configuration / Tests / DNS Blacklists). Finally, save your configuration to apply the configuration changes by pressing Ctrl + S. (Pre-4.3 versions also require a restart of the ORF Service: if you have such version, press Ctrl + U instead).
The recommended DNS Blacklists are listed in our best practices guide. We would recommend updating your whole definition set, as Spamhaus has also released an update recently. To wipe out Blackholes.us and to update Spamhaus at once, follow these steps.
As promised earlier, we have revisited the question of supporting the IIS 6 SMTP Service under Windows Server 2008 and found workarounds for the technical issues of the platform. I am glad to report that ORF 5 will support the complete range of IIS SMTP Service versions from Windows Server 2000 to 2008 R2, extending ORF’s already complete support for all the above platforms for Microsoft Exchange.
Spamhaus has recently announced a new list called Composite Snow Shoe List (CSS), which is now included in Spamhaus SBL and ZEN. To learn more about the new list and to download the updated definition file, please visit
http://www.vamsoft.com/zen.asp
The goal of the Composite Snow Shoe List is to spam the so called “snow shoe” spammers, who send only moderate amount of junk from a single IP to stay under the radar. They spread the load between multiple IP addresses and domains to dilute reputation metrics and evade filters (just like a snow shoe spreads the weight, hence the name).
Hopefully, the new list will improve your current filtering efficiency even further.