We have discovered a problem with the blocked senders list. When people block too much stuff (ie more than 500 addresses/domains), notes will start to lockup when receiving emails. Our best guess is that Notes can’t handle comparing incoming email to all those addresses. It’s become a pretty serious problem for us. Our only workaround is to ask the user to remove all addresses from the blocked senders list. That’s a little too “scorched earth” for my liking. Is anybody else running into this problem? If so, what workarounds have you come up with? Is there any hope that future versions of Notes will be able to handle spam better?
Subject: To many blocked sender addresses causing notes lockups
I’ve had a similar problem with a user who gets bombarded daily with spam mail. I also had to tell the user that they shouldn’t always block a sender if they receive spam messages from them. My philosophy is that you should only block a sender or domain if you consistently receive spam from them over the course of a few days. In many cases, the spam mail is coming from PCs that have been infected with mass mailer viruses or from spoofed e-mail addresses. Blocking addresses in these situations is futile since the “target” address is seldom used more than once.
Using the DNS blacklist filters on your SMTP inbound controls is a good start to trimming spam.
Subject: RE: To many blocked sender addresses causing notes lockups
Thanks for your responses. We were already using RBL’s to block spam, but it wasn’t enough. What we ended up doing was using the hueristic filtering capabilites of our “Symantec Mail Security for SMTP 4.0” software (highly, highly recommend to anyone looking for all around email filtering solution). Whenever the hueristic engine determines a piece of email is spam, it tags the subject line with "SpamDetected: " . We then setup rules in everyone’s mail files that move emails with "SpamDetected: " in the subject line to the junk mail folder. It works great. False positives are still retrievable from the junk mail folder, but spam stays out of the inbox. We’ve stopped using the block from sender tool, as it has proven more or less useless in our situation. Our firm gets ridiculous amounts of spam. Current statistics on our Symantec mail security server show 50% of all incoming email is spam. This is in part because many of our users are required to post their email address publicly on the internet for reasons I will not go into. Moral of the story: if you can’t resolve the issue, make it irrelevant.
Subject: RE: To many blocked sender addresses causing notes lockups
We were having the same problem and after some long discussion with IBM they recognized the issue and advised us to upgrade to 6.5.2 or higher. Then block one more sender to complete the fix.
They knew of the bug in 6.5 and told me 6.5.2 would fix this. Been two weeks now and all is running smoothly.
Subject: RE: To many blocked sender addresses causing notes lockups
That’s great news! Does the server need to be at 6.5.2 as well?
Subject: To many blocked sender addresses causing notes lockups
The answer is into your post : spam !Instead of having each user blocking addresses, you can configure your SMTP servers to look at some official blacklist sites and refuse spam mails. In ND6, this feature is well working and you can rely on it. Have a check at some Redbooks or have a look at the Admin help db.