Chris Linfoot | Hats off (and a medal) to Raymond Neeves

Monday, 15. September 2003

Hats off (and a medal) to Raymond Neeves

Domino has a whitelist at last.

Raymond Neeves posted to LDD about his Intercept addin for Domino servers again last week.

I did read the post - I always do - but too carelessly this time

I had in my mind some half remembered conversation, probably dating back to Domino 5, wherein it was established that there was no way to hook the SMTP listener with an external addin. So in order to do any enhanced manipulation of SMTP messages, say to improve the granularity of DNSBL accept/reject/tag functionality or to add a whitelist, it was necessary to accept entire messages and process them after they had been placed in mail.box.

Call me obsessive, but I have always preferred a big, fat, protocol level "554 go away now" to any kind of processing after delivery. Sends a clear message to the spammer and avoids wasted bandwidth, storage &c.

Call me lazy too (for assuming that Raymond's addin worked only after message delivery and could not also intervene during the SMTP phase of message delivery) and hats off to Maria Helm for making me look again.

Well, I did look again and Raymond, you have done a tremendous job.

I spent a few minutes this morning building a test server (thanks VMware for making that so easy) and loaded Intercept version 3 on it. What can I say? It just works. I'm not quite ready to use this in production, but I intend to do so, and soon.

Intercept can interrogate DNSBLs and local lists of blocked IPs and cause blocking, tagging or whitelisting both during the SMTP protocol phase of message delivery and afterwards (so it even works with Domino 5 servers).

Well done Raymond Neeves.

Category: Domino: Whitelist
Technorati: Domino: Whitelist

Comments :

1. Joe nelson12/11/2003 21:56:03
Homepage: http://www.dangsite.com

So how could one download the add-in? I went to the links in the shared URLs and it is asking for me to authenicate. So how do you become "special" enough to download this hook?

Cheers

2. Chris Linfoot13/11/2003 08:30:31

Nothing special about me. I now see an authentication page when going to that URL, so something has changed at Intentia.com.au.

Have posted some messages for Raymond over at LDD. Hope he gets them and makes contact with me, because the Intercept addin that I am now testing is very good and with a couple of minor tweaks would be perfect (I would even pay for it).

3. John Rowland02/12/2003 17:18:57

I had downloaded the nIntercept dll and templates before intentia.com.au went protected and I have had a look at the templates. I am trying to figure out the implementation. We are currently using the R6 blacklist with three lists polled. It is working very effectively, but we are getting an increasing number of calls from legitimate senders who have been bounced. Consequently, we are considering Intercept. This is my aim: to continue blacklisting, but to be able to allow specific ip addresses or hosts through. I assume this is doable with Intercept.

Here are some questions:

1. If I understand it, Intercept will replace the built-in R6 blacklist mechanism. Do we need to disable that in the server config document or will Intercept just ignore it or will it work in conjunction with it?

2. I have never used any server extensions. Do I just add the ExtMgr_AddIns=nIntercept line to the notes.ini file then restart the server and configure using the Intercept Config NSF file?

3. Each server in the Intercept Config db can be set for Connect, Accept or Mailbox. Why should I use one versus another given my stated aims?

4. The DNS Server and IP Address documents give white, grey and black options, but the Hostname only black and grey. Why?

5. The DNS Server view in the template contains three blacklists. I assume that this is where I configure the specific lists I want to use. Conversely, if I create a new document in that view for a domain name I want to allow and set it to white, it will let mail from that domain through. Right?

6. How might I use the Field config docs?

I realize that this is lengthy. If there is some documentation that can answer these questions, please point me in that direction. Any advice that you as a "pioneer" with this application can offer would be appreciated. Thanks.

John Rowland
Mail Administrator
Murphy Oil Corporation

4. Chris Linfoot04/12/2003 12:19:03

Have emailed a response to this as it is quite long.

5. John DiFrancesco08/12/2003 18:55:08

What is the current status of Intercept? I am upgrading my client's server from R5 to ND6 tonight in order to use DNSBL's (as well as take advantage of other ND6 functionality), and I was interested in whether I should go with Intercept instead of the default ND6 DNSBL functionality.

With the site [redacted] returning an error message now, I'm not sure if Intercept is "off the market" or temporarily unavailable. Do you have a copy of the original download that you would feel comfortable sharing/mirroring?

TIA

-John

6. Chris Linfoot09/12/2003 08:39:31

Will email a response shortly.

7. Erik Hoglund12/02/2004 10:21:04

I would also like to know where (if) intercept is avalaliable.

//Erik

8. Chris Linfoot12/02/2004 10:53:28

According to Declan Lynch, Domino will have a native whitelist ere long...

http://www.qtzar.com/blogs/qtzar.nsf/d6plinks/DLYH-5VLSZW

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The IBM Lotus Notes/Domino "spam bible".