Provided by: mailavenger_0.8.4-2_amd64 bug

NAME

       asmtpd - Avenger SMTP Daemon

SYNOPSIS

       asmtpd [-d] [--verbose] [-f config-file]

       asmtpd [--spf] [-f config-file]

       asmtpd [--rbl] [-f config-file]

       asmtpd [--avenge] [-f config-file] recipient [sender [IP-address]]

       asmtpd [--synfp] [tcp-port [IP-address [interface ...]]]

       asmtpd [--netpath] IP-address [network-hops]

DESCRIPTION

       asmtpd is the central server daemon for Mail Avanger.  Mail Avenger is a highly-
       configurable MTA-independent SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) server designed to let
       you filter and fight SPAM before accepting incoming mail from a client machine.  Filtering
       spam before accepting a message from a remote machine offers a number of benefits.  First,
       while mail is in the process of being sent over the network, more information is available
       about the client machine, allowing the possibility of more accurate decisions about spam.
       (For example, machines infected with viruses may be able to be detected by probing.)

       Second, filtering during mail transfer allows more options for what to do with potential
       spam.  For instance, one can defer the mail--essentially asking the client to send it
       again later--which legitimate mail clients will do automatically, but "spam 'bots"
       typically won't.  Moreover, it is much safer to reject spam before accepting a message.
       With typical after-delivery spam checkers, the only options are to discard spam silently
       (risking false positives that completely disappear), or to notify the sender, but if the
       sender is forged, this causes more unwanted mail.  By rejecting mail during an SMTP
       transaction, this ensures legitimate mail gets bounced to the sender, while most spam will
       simply disappear.

       Finally, filtering during an SMTP transaction saves resources, since spam messages need
       never to be spooled in the mail queue.

       There are many ways of fighting and detecting spam.  Though Mail Avenger has a few basic
       mechanisms built-in, the philosophy of the system is to let system administrators and
       individual users plug in their own filtering criteria.  The intent is for Mail Avenger to
       do the hard part--talk the SMTP network protocol, handle asynchronous DNS resolution, SPF
       rule checking, probing of remote SMTP servers for legitimacy, etc.--while users can set
       policy through configuration files with simple shell commands.

       The basic approach is for users to create scripts in a directory called $HOME/.avenger
       that specify policies for what mail to accept and what to reject or defer.  System-wide
       fallback policies can also be specified by files in /etc/avenger/.  The program that
       executes these scripts is called avenger, and is described more fully in its own manual
       page.

       asmtpd can be configured to map different email addresses and domains to different local
       users, in addition to a large number of other configurable features.  These are described
       more fully in the asmtpd.conf(5) manual page.

       asmtpd also adds a new header field to messages, "X-Avenger:", containing information that
       may be of use to spam filters.  "X-Avenger:" contains a list of semi-colon-separated
       tokens, which if present mean the following:

       version=number
           Specifies the version of Mail Avenger that received the message.

       receiver=hostname
           Specifies that asmtpd was running on hostname when it received the message.

       client-ip=IP-address
       client-port=port-number
           These specify that the client end of the TCP connection from which the mail came used
           IP address IP-address and port port-number.

       client-dnsfail=error
           Specifies that a reverse lookup on the client's IP address (to determine the client's
           hostname) resulted in error.

       bounce-res=code
           Specifies that attempts to send bounces to the bounce address of the sender result in
           SMTP error code.  (This is the same value as the SENDER_BOUNCERES environment variable
           described in the avenger(1) manual page.)

       syn-fingerprint=fingerprint
           Contains a description of the initial TCP SYN packet used by the client to initiate
           the TCP connection over which the mail was sent.  See the description of CLIENT_SYNFP
           in the avenger(1) manual page for an explanation of the format.

       colon-space
           If present, means the client included a space between the colon in the command "MAIL
           FROM:" or "RCPT TO:" and the subsequent "<" that begins an email address.

       eager-pipelining
           If present, means that the client attempted to pipeline SMTP commands before receiving
           the "250 PIPELINING" response to the SMTP "HELO" or "EHLO" command.  This field has
           the same meaning as the CLIENT_PIPELINING environment variable in avenger(1).

       post
           If present, means the client issued the invalid SMTP command POST.  See CLIENT_POST in
           avenger(1).

       network-hops=nhops
           This is the number of network hops from the server to the client that sent this mail
           (if Mail Avenger can figure this out).  See CLIENT_NETHOPS in avenger(1).

       network-path=IP-list
           Set to a space-separated list of as many intermediary network hops as Mail Avenger can
           efficiently discover on the way from the server to the client that send the mail.  See
           CLIENT_NETHOPS in avenger(1).

       network-path-time=time
           To save network traffic, Mail Avenger briefly caches routes to a particular client.
           network-path-time specifies the precise time at which the information in network-path
           was discovered.  The time is expressed as a standard Unix time (number of seconds
           since Jan 1, 1970).

       RBL=domain (IP-addrs)[, domain (IP-addrs), ...]
           For the each real-time blackhole list (RBL) domain specified in asmtpd.conf (see the
           RBL directive in the asmtpd.conf(5) man page), if the client shows up in the RBL, IP-
           addrs specifies what the RBL returns.

           Usually, RBLs just return 127.0.0.1 to specify that a client is present in the
           blacklist.  However, some services use different IP addresses to encode some
           information about why the client is listed.  If an RBL returns multiple IP addresses,
           asmtpd includes them all, separated by spaces.

       RBL-errors=domain (error)[, domain (error), ...]
           Lists any RBL domains Mail Avenger was unable to query at the time of receipt of the
           message.

   GETTING STARTED
       The following is a brief description of how to get started with asmtpd.  More information
       is available in the installation guide /usr/local/share/avenger/INSTALL, as well as the
       asmtpd.conf(5) and avenger(1) manual pages.

       •   If you haven't already, create a user called avenger on your system.  This is the user
           ID under which system-wide avenger scripts will run.  (If you wish to use a name other
           than "avenger", you can put the directive "AvengerUser user" in the asmtpd.conf
           configuration file when you create that.)

       •   Create the directory /etc/avenger.

       •   Create a file /etc/avenger/asmtpd.conf.  Copy the sample file in
           /usr/local/share/avenger/asmtpd.conf and edit to taste.

       •   Create a file /etc/avenger/domains.  List each domain for which you would like to
           receive mail, followed by a colon, one per line.  For example:

               my.first.domain:
               my.second.domain:

       •   Fire it up!  Run the command "asmtpd" as root.  You may also want to set things up to
           run this command automatically on system startup.

       •   Play with scripts.  Read the man page for avenger(1), create a .avenger/rcpt file in
           your home directory, and maybe create a site-wide default file /etc/avenger/default.
           You will also very likely want to create a script /etc/avenger/unknown to reject mail
           to unknown users.  See the man page for aliascheck(1) and the sample
           /usr/local/share/avenger/unknown for an example of how to do this.

       •   Finally, you may want to try the avenger.local delivery agent.  See the
           avenger.local(8) man page for more information.

   OPTIONS
       Normally, when started, asmtpd runs as a daemon, sends its output to the system log, and
       looks for its configuration file in /etc/avenger/asmtpd.conf.  The following options
       change this behavior:

       -d  Tells asmtpd to stay in the foreground and send its diagnostic messages to standard
           error, rather than to the system log.

       --verbose
           Ordinarily, asmtpd will attempt to avoid sending overly many duplicate copies of a
           message to the system log file.  The --verbose option changes this behavior, so that
           certain error conditions (such as missing directories) get reported each time they
           affect a piece of mail.

       -f config-file
           Specifies an alternate location for the configuration file.

       In addition, several other options are available to run asmtpd in various test modes, for
       making use of or debugging features.

       --spf [-f config-file]
           Runs in a mode where asmtpd simply performs SPF tests on <IP-address, sender> pairs it
           reads from standard input.  Can be used to validate asmtpd's SPF implementation
           against a different implementation, or to debug SPF records (particularly in
           conjunction with the SPF_TRACE environment variable discussed below).

       --rbl [-f config-file]
           Tests asmtpd's RBL (realtime black hole) list implementation.  The configuration file
           should contain one or more RBL directives (see the manual page for asmtpd.conf(5)).
           In this mode, asmtpd will simply read IP addresses from its input and output the
           result of RBL checks.

       --avenge [-f config-file] recipient [sender [IP-address]]
           Tests the avenger script for recipient, which must be a fully-qualified email address
           with a domain.  This simulates an SMTP transaction in which client IP-address tries to
           send mail from sender to recipient.  If recipient is not specified, it defaults to
           postmaster@HostName (where Hostname is the local hostname, as specified in
           asmtpd.conf).  If <IP-address> is not specified, the local address is used.

           With this option, asmtpd will log a transcript of avenger's requests to standard
           error, regardless of the actual DebugAvenger setting.  At the end, outputs the SMTP
           response asmtpd would give to the "RCPT" command.

       --synfp [tcp-port [IP-address [interface ...]]]
           Tests asmtpd's SYN fingerprinting implementation.  Listens to the network and for each
           incoming TCP connection, prints the IP address and port of the client, along with a
           fingerprint describing the characteristics of the initial SYN packet from the TCP
           connection.  (For a description of the SYN fingerprint format, see the description of
           CLIENT_SYNFP in the man page for avenger(1).)

           By default, asmtpd will print the fingerprints of any incoming TCP connection.  If
           tcp-port is non-zero, however, asmtpd will only consider SYN packets sent to that TCP
           port number.  If IP-address is supplied and is not 0.0.0.0, asmtpd will only took at
           TCP packets for that particular IP address (useful if your local machine has multiple
           IP addresses).  Finally, by default asmtpd will listen to whatever network interfaces
           correspond to IP-address (or all active non-loopback interfaces for 0.0.0.0 or
           unspecified).  You can alternatively specify explicitly which network interfaces
           asmtpd should listen on (e.g., "eth0 eth1").

           To use this option, you must be root (or at least have permission to open the
           /dev/bpf* packet filter devices on your machine).

       --netpath IP-address [network-hops]
           asmtpd records the network path to mail clients using a technique similar to the
           traceroute utility found on many operating systems.  The --netpath option tests
           asmtpd's implementation of this functionality.  If network-hops is positive, asmtpd
           will record only the first network-hops hops on the way to IP-address.  If network-
           hops is negative, asmtpd will output only the last network-hops hops on the way to IP-
           address.  If network-hops is zero, or is not supplied, asmtpd will output the entire
           route (or as much as it can discover, firewall permitting).

           To use this option, you must run asmtpd as root for it to use raw sockets.

ENVIRONMENT

       SPF_TRACE
           When set to a positive integer, causes asmtpd to send to standard error a trace of the
           checks it is performing while processing SPF records.  If set to 1, simply records
           which SPF traces are happening.  Setting it to 2 provides more information, while
           setting it to 3 provides a complete trace.  (Setting the value to 4 or higher
           additionally causes asmtpd to send the results of all SPF-related DNS queries to its
           standard output, a feature mostly useful to the implementor.)

       TMPDIR
           asmtpd creates temporary files to hold incoming mail messages before injecting them
           into the mail system.  It usually creates a temporary subdirectory of /var/tmp to hold
           these files (and cleans up the directory on exit).  If TMPDIR is set, its value will
           be used in place of /var/tmp.

FILES

       /etc/avenger/asmtpd.conf, /etc/avenger/domains, /etc/avenger/aliases,
       /etc/avenger/unknown, /etc/avenger/default, $HOME/.avenger/rcpt*
       /usr/local/share/avenger/*

SEE ALSO

       asmtpd.conf(5), avenger(1)

       The Mail Avenger home page: <http://www.mailavenger.org/>.

BUGS

       If the packet capture library (libpcap) header files were not available at compile time,
       asmtpd will not support TCP SYN fingerprints and the --synfp option will not be available.
       You may be able to fix this by installing a package for your OS called pcap, libpcap, or
       libpcap-devel (depending on the distribution), then re-running ./configure and re-
       compiling Mail Avenger.

AUTHOR

       David Mazieres