Step-by-step instructions for requesting, installing, and running the Guardian Mail Comparison Tool in logfile mode to evaluate DNSBL performance using your own mail logs.
To request the “Comparison Tool,” you must have an active trial of Guardian Mail. You may sign up for a trial at https://abusix.com/contact-us/ Once your trial is live, ask our support team for the comparison binary. They will need to know if you need a Linux, Mac, or Windows binary.
Download the “Comparison Tool” and make it executable:
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$ chmod +x ami_compare_linux
If run without any options – it will output its usage and available command line options:
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$ ./ami_compare.linuxUsage: ami_compare.linux --apikey <apikey> --list <list> <filename>Options: --version Show version number [boolean] --apikey Guardian Mail API key [required] --list DNS suffix of the DNSBL to compare against [required] --debug Write debug output to stderr [boolean] --cache Cache result data to reduce DNS load [boolean] -h, --help Show help [boolean]Copyright 2021, Abusix Inc.Node v8.17.0 (x64)Using DNS servers: 1.1.1.1Not enough non-option arguments: got 0, need at least 1
To use the tool in logfile mode, you must provide a file that contains a list of IPs to be checked. This list should be extracted from your production system(s) log files. The logs should be no more than two days old and as recent as possible to achieve the best results. The list can either be a simple, de-duplicated list of IP addresses or a list that includes a count (e.g., occurrences) and IP addresses. The latter is preferred, as it will provide a more accurate result.
Here is an example of extracting a list of IPs from a Postfix server using standard UNIX tools. This can be modified to work with most logfile formats with some minor modifications.
This will create a file called “ips_to_test” that contains “<count> <ip>” pairs, where <count> is the number of times each IP address has been seen in the logs. The file will be sorted such that the IP addresses with the largest number of occurrences appear first.