[PLUG] Webmail server suggestions

Jeme A Brelin jeme at brelin.net
Thu May 6 12:30:03 UTC 2004


On Thu, 6 May 2004, Paul Johnson wrote:
> Jeme A Brelin <jeme at brelin.net> writes:
> > You don't have to reject at SMTP time in order to silently ignore the
> > spam.
>
> Why bother accepting it if everybody using that server is guaranteed to
> not want it?  Seems like it's more practical to just tell your server to
> give spammers the finger and tell them to piss off than accept their
> spew.

You're not giving the spammer the finger.  The spam is probably
originating from a bot on some Windows box somewhere or other automated
script that doesn't care what you have to say about the message.  A bad
SMTP return code doesn't change a thing for the bot.  They're not going to
take the address off the list just because it failed this time around.

So it doesn't matter WHEN you ignore it, so long as it doesn't interfere
with your regular course of business.

In addition to that (or in consequence of it), SMTP has timeouts and
processing each message for content BEFORE you send a return code will
take much longer than just sending an accept for all well-formed messages
to valid addresses and moving on.  If anything causes high load on the
machine, its conceivable that the SMTP will timeout before the content is
examined and you could end up rejecting valid mail (albeit temporarily).

I don't see any advantage to SMTP=time spam filtering.  After SMTP and
before delivery is handy enough.

I currently use the procmail approach but now that all of the users on the
system are using spamassassin, I'll probably go ahead and configure the
milter.

J.
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     Jeme A Brelin
    jeme at brelin.net
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