Adding the Abusix Mail Intelligence blocklists to MDaemon

Adding the Abusix Mail Intelligence blocklists to MDaemon

Abusix Mail Intelligence is a set of blocklists that are designed to help protect mail servers from spam, malware, phishing and ransom attacks.

You can sign up for a free 14-day trial of Abusix Mail Intelligence at https://abusix.com/. The trial will monitor the number of queries you make against Abusix Mail Intelligence and as long as the number isn’t in excess of 5,000 queries a day, you’d typically be able to sign up for their free usage tier. On very large or very busy mail servers, prices start at $10 a month for 10,000 queries a day. For further details please see the Abusix Mail Intelligence Pricing Page.

Setup Steps

Once signed up to Abusix, at https://app.abusix.com/email-protection make a note of Your API Key.

MDaemon Configuration


At Security -> Spam Filter -> DNS-BL -> Hosts, tick 'Enable DNS-BL queries' (if it is not already ticked) and add a new DNS-BL in the form:

DNS-BL host: YOUR-API-KEY.combined.mail.abusix.zone

Message: $IP$ blocked by Abusix

(replace YOUR-API-KEY with the actual API KEY Abusix provide)

In Security -> Spam Filter -> DNS-BL -> Settings, you can now decide what action MDaemon should take if a sender mail server returns a positive blocked response from Abusix.

If you’d prefer to accept the email and add a score that means MDaemon flags it as spam, then make a note of the Security -> Spam Filter -> “A message is spam if it scores greater or equal to” value (the default value here is 5.0). Then set the Security -> Spam Filter -> DNS-BL -> Settings -> “DNS-BL match adds this many points to the spam score”, to a similar score (that is, 5.5):



MDaemon would then route this email according to your Security -> Spam Filter -> “Fate of Spam” setting.

If you’d rather MDaemon just rejects connections from mail servers that return a positive response from Abusix, then tick Security -> Spam Filter -> DNS-BL -> Settings -> “SMTP server should refuse mail from block-listed IP’s”:



Important Note:


Abusix allow you to perform queries against them regardless of  the DNS servers MDaemon  is using, as long as you have a valid API Key and account with them.
However, if you are already using other DNS-BL’s in MDaemon like zen.spamhaus.org, then its important that MDaemon  is not using open DNS resolvers (Google DNS, CloudFlare DNS, etc) or these checks might fail. These specific DNS-BL’s don’t allow queries from these DNS servers due to the volume of queries they create.

You can check the DNS servers being used here:

MDaemon: Setup -> Server Settings -> DNS