Utilities: Administration: Server: Server Settings: Security: Bans

Mail Receive Rules

Defines the rules by which Aurea List Manager determines whether or not mail should be processed.

By default, Aurea List Manager looks at the username of email it receives to determine whether it should process the message. The host name portion of the mail address is not consulted. It does this to support any number of virtual hosts without needing to be configured. By default, Aurea List Manager automatically assumes the hostname identity of any email it receives which is addressed to a valid Aurea List Manager user name.

This Mail Receive Rules option allows you to change this default behavior, so that Aurea List Manager first looks at the rules you have defined, and if the local recipient address does not match a rule, the message is not processed.

The Mail Receive Rules are simple text search rules. For example, to accept any mail addressed to the "yourcompany.com" domain, the rule would be:

yourcompany.com

This would allow any of these different addresses to be received:

listmanager@yourcompany.com
listmanager@lists.yourcompany.com
listmanager@discussions.yourcompany.com

But any address which did not have "yourcompany.com" in it would be rejected.

If your rule was "@yourcompany.com", only the first example above "listmanager@yourcompany.com" would be accepted.

The most common use for this feature is if you are using Aurea List Manager in front of another mail server, and you want to make sure that Aurea List Manager only accepts mail addressed to itself, and forwards on any mail addressed otherwise. If you have told it to "Forward non-ListManager Mail" to another location, any mail which does not match a "Mail Receive Rule" is automatically forwarded on to the other server. See Utilites: Administration: Server: Server Settings: Network Settings: Receive Email.

If you do not have "Forward non-ListManager Mail" defined, then mail which does not match a Mail Receive Rule is simply rejected.

You can define multiple Mail Receive Rules, each on a separate line.

Ban All Mail From

This option allows you to reject any incoming mail from specific addresses. For example, if a user is a troublemaker, you can have Aurea List Manager automatically reject any postings from this person.

Note

This mail from: value applies to the SMTP transaction MAIL FROM: <> value. In email messages, this is usually, but not necessarily the same as the From: in the mail you receive. Aurea List Manager displays the MAIL FROM: <> value in any message it receives in the Return-Path: header line. Most other mail servers follow this convention as well.

You can use this feature if a user has threatened to mail bomb you and you want to protect your server from them. Mail bombing is the tactic of sending hundreds of messages to someone, in the hopes of overwhelming them, or their server, and wasting their time. If you ban someone's email with this technique, Aurea List Manager does not even accept their messages over SMTP, and the amount of processing it does for each message is extremely small, thus defusing the power of their mail bomb.

You can specify as many email addresses as you like, by putting each address on a separate line. For example:

bob_mischief@example.com
jane_trouble@elsewhere.com

Make sure you specify the complete domain name. For example, @google.com, not @google.

Ban Reload Period

Large numbers of banned addresses may greatly slow how quickly Aurea List Manager may create new members. Aurea List Manager can load banned addresses to a cache, which speeds member creation. This setting specifies how manyminutes Aurea List Manager should wait to reload the banned address cache. The default is 0, meaning Aurea List Manager does not cache banned addresses.

The less frequently Aurea List Manager reloads the banned address cache, the less impact it has on member creation. However, a more frequent reload setting may be desirable in situations when banned addresses are added frequently.

FCC Domain Name (Text Format) URL

Aurea List Manager may download the list of domains found at the URL listed here. The United States government has specified strict rules regulating sending email to domains used by wireless devices. Aurea List Manager may download this list of domains automatically from the URL listed here if the FCC Domains task is scheduled to do so in Utilities: Administration: Server: Server Settings: Scheduled Tasks.

Aurea List Manager does NOT download this list of domains to ban unless the FCC Domains scheduled task is enabled. To have these domains banned, you must either Apply Bans in Members: Ban Addresses or enable the Apply Member Ban Rules scheduled task.