We’ve had two incidents recently that can result in some mail problems.

     First, one of our customers had a very simple dictionary word password and it was guessed and used to send spam.  If you receive spam in your INBOX and it has ‘mail.eskimo.com’ in the header, then it bypassed spam filtering because it was an authenticated customer that sent it.  The password on this account has been changed to something less guessable.

     I have also increased the ban time on fail2ban for multiple offenses to a year.  The upside of this is it won’t allow botnets to come back a week later and try again.  The downside is if you get your password wrong too many times you will need to contact us to reset the ban on your IP.

     Second, mx2, one of the incoming servers failed to remount /home after a reboot and this caused some soft bounces.  With a properly functioning MTA on the sending side, they would first try the other MX server, and if it also rejected mail, requeue and try later.  At least one server did neither and hard bounced the message when it should not have.

     The /home file system has been manually mounted but the last kernel upgrade seems to have made this flakey so this is likely to be problematic until the next kernel which as things have been going has been about once per week.