Milter-greylist

manu@... wrote:
> Chris Hoogendyk <hoogendyk@...> wrote:
>   
>> 1) Am I right in guessing that I needed to restart milter-greylist? Is
>> this just proper SOP? Or might there be a bug where it isn't 
>> straightening out what it has in memory when it gets a change like this
>> in the greylist.conf on the fly?
>>     
> You should not need to restart it to get changes taken into account. But
> indeed sone change don't affect what you already have in memory.
>
>   
>> 2) Should I continue looking for other causes of our problems? (i.e. is
>> the change in subnetmatch just a red herring?) Or is it probable that
>> this really was the cause of our problems?
>>     
>
> I have trouble to understand why your had difficulties to automatically
> restart it.
>   

Not milter-greylist's fault at all. We used to have some custom code 
embedded in milter-greylist that checked the popip.db to see if someone 
had checked their mail from that IP, and if so to bypass greylisting. 
This involved adding a call paramater "-b popip.db" to point to the 
database. When we upgraded from the very old 1.6.3 of milter-greylist to 
the newest 4.0, we ditched our custom code. By this time we had 
implemented other procedures that simplified access for our users. 
However, I forgot to remove the "-b" parameter from my greycheck script. 
It had never been invoked since the upgrade on Nov. 28, which speaks 
well for the new milter-greylist. It came up this time, because I messed up.

>> 3) My boss is talking like milter-greylist may have outlived its 
>> usefulness. It does cause headaches for lots of users who don't want 
>> mail delayed even if it is attributable to the other side being 
>> misconfigured. 
>>     
>
> You can make greylisting user-configurable. My users have a web form
> where they can choose various settings, including no greylisting at all.
> It's their spam, after all.
>
> I use a LDAP directory to store the user settings.
>
>   
>> And, over the past year or so, it seems like more and 
>> more spammers have implemented resending (anyone tracking this have 
>> statistics?).
>>     
>
> I use 15mn for the average server and several hours for anyone listed in
> a pool of cable/xDSL addresses. It's still very satisfying. 
>   

Well, satisfying is subjective. I was looking for hard statistics, sort 
of like what shuttlebox and Ondrej posted.


---------------

Chris Hoogendyk

-
   O__  ---- Systems Administrator
  c/ /'_ --- Biology & Geology Departments
 (*) \(*) -- 140 Morrill Science Center
~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst 

<hoogendyk@...>

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Erd\ufffds 4