Author: Yves Lacombe

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Yves Lacombe

Yves Lacombe has been working on Internet Infrastructure products for over 15 years. He is an Internet Security expert and one of his company's gurus. He has forgotten more things about Email Security than most people will ever know. He runs numerous heavily secured email servers and is constantly getting in trouble while trying to hack into his company's products. Yves has two mottos that he lives by: “The buck stops here” and “Lets just get the job done”.

Articles by this author

Cool Tool: WinSCP

I just wanted to share with you a very useful tool that’s been around for a while now, and it helped me solve a problem on a customer’s machine. To properly investigate, I had to extract several logs from the customer’s server on a scheduled basis and have them FTP'd here so that I could keep tabs on the server's behavior. (Feb 26, 2010)

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Blocked by RFC-IGNORANT ... Now what?

From time to time, customers wind up getting blocked by a seldom seen blacklist called "RFC-Ignorant." Unlike classical blacklists that are usually honeypot driven, this one is driven by people who have manually reported you as violating RFC. (Jan 22, 2010)

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Reverse DNS checking: Is it safe to use?

Every time I do a setup with a customer, the question always comes up: Should we use Reverse DNS checking or not when configuring connection-level blocking security measures? (Dec 04, 2009)

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Country-Based Blocking

Is it good or bad? Well the answer is "it depends." If your organization only operates within North-America, for instance, blocking the more prolific spam sources by country may be a very good way to reduce the amount of traffic hitting your MTA. (Oct 30, 2009)

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Email Security Gateway Deployment: Avoid These Common Mistakes

Don't declare your primary mail server (MTA) as a secondary MX. (Oct 02, 2009)

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SPF woes with third party services … a workaround.

Many people use SPF (Sender Policy Framework) as an anti-spoofing measure. They create an SPF record in their DNS zone for their domain. From time to time though, some customers will do business or use third party services that will send out Email on their domain's behalf and unfortunately, this will cause recipient MTAs to hard-fail or soft-fail these messages. (Sep 04, 2009)

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Security Back to Basics

You can use Windows Routing and Remote Access (RRAS) for firewalling purposes. It's fairly simple to setup as well. (Aug 21, 2009)

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