Recently my personal forum has become the target of email spam, apparently always coming from different auto generated email addresses on domains like qq.com , 139.com etc that I have put on my blacklist. Clearly I am doing it wrong… can anyone advise? See screenshot. Discourse is sending emails to …

[image] codinghorror: Is there a link on how to do this in the direct delivery email topic? An appropriate howto has been written, and link thereto has been added in the direct delivery email topic.

I had the same problem. I’m using the incoming mail server and tried adding qq.com to the blacklist, but it didn’t work, I think because they have apparently hacked a bunch of servers, so the mail isn’t coming from qq.com , but instead the hacked server, so the blacklist doesn’t work. I ended up jus…

Thanks, Jay! It helps to know I’m not alone. :wink:

The way i eventually solved this problem is to turn on post approval for incoming emails. This is done by setting the approval level limit to 1 instead of 0. So all posts from email gets added to the pending list. Then you can delete those users and blacklist their ip. Cons of this is that a post …

[image] tobiaseigen: have set up direct delivery for inbound mail, with a mail-receiver.yml Can you assist here @mpalmer ? What do you recommend?

OK, based on what I’ve seen here and found in my explorations, I may have found an interim solution. Not great but at least not generating gazillions of emails. removed qq.com etc from the discourse blacklist disabled my own email notifications Now I can delete these messages and staged users at …

You can ban SMTP sender domains with at SMTP time with sender_access rules, and do pretty much anything you like with mail via header checks. Given how heavily abused qq.com is, that’ll probably go a long way to solving your immediate problem. Discourse with incoming e-mail enabled is really very …

[image] mpalmer: ban SMTP sender domains with at SMTP time with sender_access rules Is there a link on how to do this in the direct delivery email topic? I suspect this will come up a bit.

Thanks for the suggestions, Matt. I will think on it - it all makes sense. In the meantime my temporary fix appears to have worked and I have stopped sending responses. Now I just need to figure out how to delete all these users and their messages until the spammers give up on me.. :wink: My own us…

[image] schungx: The way i eventually solved this problem is to turn on post approval for incoming emails. This is done by setting the approval level limit to 1 instead of 0. So all posts from email gets added to the pending list. Then you can delete those users and blacklist their ip. Cons of…

Relating to this topic, it seems to me my problem would mostly go away if discourse simply ignored emails from blocked users or blacklisted domains. Currently it responds with an email notification, generating tens of thousands of needless emails and triggering mailgun’s warnings. (I have no evidenc…

Allowing topic creation through direct delivery email in makes my forum vulnerable to spammers

Product Support

tobiaseigen (Tobias Eigen) May 27, 2019, 7:52pm 19

Hoo! That worked. Thanks, Michael, for saving me 3000+ mouse clicks.

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Allowing topic creation through direct delivery email in makes my forum vulnerable to spammers

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