Shallow Thoughts : : email

"Joe-job" spam (forged From addresses)

I'm in a Yahoo group where a spammer just posted a message that looked like it was coming from someone in the group, so Yahoo allowed it.

The list owner posted a message about using good passwords so your account isn't hacked since that causes problems for everyone.

Of course, that's good advice and using good passwords is always a good idea. But I though this sounded more like a Joe-job spam, in which the spammer forges the From address to look like it's coming from someone else.

Normal users encounter this in two ways:

1. You start getting tons of bounce messages that look as though you sent spam to hundreds of people and they're refusing it.
2. You see spam that looks like it came from a friend of yours, or spam on a mailing list that looks like it came from a legitimate member of that list.

Since this sort of attack is so common, I felt the victim didn't deserve being harangued about not having set up a good password. So I posted a short note to the list explaining about Joe-jobs. But to make the point, I forged the From address of the list owner. Indeed, it got through Yahoo and out to the list just fine:

[ ... ] the spam probably wasn't from a bad password. It was probably just a spammer forging the header to look like it's from a legitimate user. It's called a "joe-job": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe-job

To illustrate, I've changed the From address on this message to look like it's coming from Adam. I have not hacked [listowner]'s account or guessed his password or anything else. If this works, and looks like it came from [listowner], then the spam could have been done the same way -- and there's no need to blame the owner of the account, or accuse them of having a bad password.

Why does this work? Why doesn't Yahoo just block messages from user@isp.com if the mail doesn't come from isp.com?

They can't! Many, many people don't send mail from the domains in their email addresses. In effect, people forge their From header all the time. Here are some examples:

• You're using you@gmail.com, but you're using Thunderbird or Eudora or Evolution or something to read and send mail from home.
• You're on your computer at home, but you're sending work-related email from your work account.
• You're on your laptop, using Thunderbird or whatever, mailing from you@isp.com, but you're at a friend's house or a hotel or conference or somewhere.
• You're sending mail from a public terminal somewhere (eek, do people really type their mail info in to these things?)
• You're reading and sending mail from a mobile phone.
• You're sending mail from your own domain, me@mydomain.com, but you're at home or somewhere else other than wherever mydomain.com is hosted.

If mailing lists rejected posts in all these cases, people would be pretty annoyed. So they don't. But that means that now and then, some Joe-job spam gets through to mailing lists. Unfortunately.

(Update: The message that inspired this may very well have been a hacked password after all case, based on the mail headers. But I found that a lot of people didn't know about Joe-jobbing, so I thought this was worth writing up anyway.)

Tags: security, email, joe-job, spam
[ 21:28 Apr 13, 2010    More tech/email | permalink to this entry ]

Fetchmail without Postfix

I've been using fetchmail for a couple of years to get mail from the mail server to my local machine. But it had one disadvantage: it meant that I had to have postfix (or a similar large and complex MTA) configured and running on every machine I use, even the lightweight laptop.

I run procmail to filter my mail into folders -- Linuxchix mail into one folder, GIMP mailing lists into another, and so forth -- and it seemed like it ought to be possible for fetchmail to call procmail directly, without going through postfix.

I found several suggestions on the web -- for instance, fetchmail-procmail-sendmail -- but they didn't work for me. fetchmail downloaded each message, passed it to procmail, and procmail appended it to the relevant mailbox without the appropriate "From " header that mail programs need to tell when each new message starts.

Finally, on a tip from bma on #linuxchix and after a little experimentation, I added this line to ~/.fetchmailrc:

mda /usr/bin/procmail -f %F -m /home/username/.procmailrc

Works great! And it's a lot faster than going through postfix.

Tags: linux, mail, fetchmail, procmail
[ 14:07 Dec 15, 2009    More tech/email | permalink to this entry ]

Pruning those huge Spamassassin files

During a server backup, Dave complained that my .spamassasin directory was taking up 87Mb. I had to agree, that seemed a bit excessive.

The only two large files were auto-whitelist at 42M and bayes_seen at 41M. Apparently these never get pruned by spamassassin.

Unfortunately, these are binary files, so you can't just edit them and remove the early stuff, and spamassassin doesn't seem to have any documentation on how to prune their data files. A thread on the Spamassassin Users list on managing Spamassassin data says it's okay to delete bayes_seen and it will be regenerated.

For pruning auto-whitelist, that same post suggests a program called check-whitelist that is only available in a spamassassin source tarball -- it's not installed as part of distro packages. Run this with --clean. But a search on the spamassassin.com wiki turns up an entry on AutoWhitelist that says you should use tools/sa-awlUtil instead (it doesn't say how to run it or where to get it -- presumably download a source tarball and then RTFSC -- read the source code?)

Really, I'm not sure auto whitelisting is such a good idea anyway, especially auto whitelist entries from several years ago, so I opted for a simpler solution: removing the auto-whitelist file at the same time that I removed bayes_seen. Indeed, both files were immediately generated as new mail came in, but they were now much smaller.

I've run for a few weeks since doing that, and I'm not noticing any difference in either the number of false positives or false negatives. (Both are, unfortuantely, large enough to be noticable, but that was true before the change as well.)

Tags: spam, spamassassin, email
[ 19:38 May 07, 2009    More tech/email | permalink to this entry ]