Pegasus Mail & Mercury

There is an application Peer Guardian (http://phoenixlabs.org/pg2/) that is an excellent IP blocker. My idea was to install the app on the server that runs Mercury. In the list of blocked ports, I could add in IP ranges from countries that I would never receive mails from. Similar to using RBL lists. The advantage to doing it this way would be not only would it block incoming mails, but also outgoing. Any thoughts?

I've been keeping tracks of IP numbers of connecting users to an online service that we are running for a number of years as we used to have huge problems with unauthorized access attempts before. We have a well defined region where our users live, but, surprisingly, every now and then some of them log in from an IP in some quite different corner of the world. Email traffic does of course differ from web access, but people travel a lot these days, for business, vacation or whatever, and I believe that blocking by country would eventually cause some valid mail to be lost.

/Rolf 

Rolf Lindby:

I've been keeping tracks of IP numbers of connecting users to an online service that we are running for a number of years as we used to have huge problems with unauthorized access attempts before. We have a well defined region where our users live, but, surprisingly, every now and then some of them log in from an IP in some quite different corner of the world. Email traffic does of course differ from web access, but people travel a lot these days, for business, vacation or whatever, and I believe that blocking by country would eventually cause some valid mail to be lost.

/Rolf 

That may be true in some cases. But in mine, I will never receive messages from some areas of the world. The copy of Mercury I run is only for my and my wife's personal email. I access my email via a Palm 700wx and my wife through a local home network connection. So I shouldn't really miss any messages.

I have been using peer guardian to block ips for quite some time. My reason for using it though was to block certain spammer ip's that just would not give up even though there email was always blocked at the transaction level.  My problem was that these spammers will filling my logs and making them practically unreadable.  They would just keep trying all day long for weeks and months on end and my logs grew from an average of 35 megs to well over 200 per month.

Just thought I would mention to anyone interested that development on peerguardian stopped a few years ago, but a new team has picked up development and it is now called peerblock.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/peerblock/