Re: [exim] using exim to reject prohibited mail to Mailman l…

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Author: Chris Lightfoot
Date:  
To: Patrick von der Hagen
CC: exim-users
Subject: Re: [exim] using exim to reject prohibited mail to Mailman lists atSMTP time
On Tue, Jul 04, 2006 at 01:54:49PM +0200, Patrick von der Hagen wrote:
    [...]

> Do you consider this to be worth the effort? Not just implementation and
> maintenance of the code, but I'm worried about load as well. Currently
> incoming mail is just dropped by MLM to an incoming queue and processed
> when recourses are available, which wouldn't work with a
> milter-interface anymore.


My experience so far is that this is working well, with
the one problem that the bounce messages generated by
remote MTAs are not as friendly as those which Mailman
itself generates. So some users who (it turns out) were
posting from various different addresses, some
non-subscribed, and then having posts approved manually
are losing out if they do not read the bounce message
carefully. (In practice almost no users read bounce
messages carefully, sadly.)

Load: depends on what your mail servers are struggling
with, but assuming that you have enough RAM to hold the
mailing list configs and disk IO is the problem, then
doing the rejection at SMTP time should reduce load, since
Exim only has to write the queue files, and not actually
do a delivery off to some other program which must write
and sync the data to disk. (Has exim actually called sync
on those files at the time the DATA ACL is run?)

Of course, if CPU is the scarce resource (much less likely
IME), then this isn't true, and doing the sender
authentication twice will make things worse.

--
``If tickets cost a pound a piece, why should you make a fuss....''
(Flanders and Swann, on 'bus fares, from A Transport Of Delight)