With the recent surge in AIB phishing mails, I thought it might be worth looking at our SpamAssassin setup to see if there was anything that could be done to filter them out.

AIB helpfully publish SPF records for the aib.ie domain, so the first port of call was SAs SPF lookups. Which I noticed weren’t happening, despite being enabled some time ago. Reloading SA resulting in the following log message in spamd.log:

Tue Aug 11 11:26:52 2009 [2221] warn: Error creating a DNS resolver
socket: at /usr/share/perl5/Mail/SpamAssassin/DnsResolver.pm line 233.

Aw snap, SA can’t do any DNS lookups, at all. Which means all of the DNS-based tests will be silently skipped. Going back through the spamd.log, I noticed these messages first started occurring when we enabled IPv6 DNS resolvers a number of months ago. Hmm, perl is obviously missing something fundamental.

So, it turns out a perl library required to create IPv6 sockets wasn’t installed, IO::Socket::INET6. This is conveniently packaged in Ubuntu:

aptitude install libio-socket-inet6-perl

A quick reload of spamassassin and we can say goodbye to all those “URGENT NOTIFICATION”s about our AIB online banking accounts. Although, the spammers have now copped on and aren’t even bothering to send from aib.ie addresses anymore..

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