[Pymilter] really long processing

[Eric S. Johansson]

Stuart D. Gathman wrote:


> The retry is up to the sending MTA.  If that MTA is sendmail, it happens
> on the next queue scan.  Using TEMPFAIL for this purpose has the additional
> benefit that most spammers give up after a TEMPFAIL, since they aren't
> sending from a real message queue, but generating the message on the fly.
> (A simple field proven anti-spam strategy is simply generate TEMPFILE
> the first time you get a message that is not otherwise authenticated,
> save the Message-ID in a database, and accept it the second time.)
> 
> A risk to using TEMPFAIL is that after a certain amount of time (typically
> 4 hours), the MTA will send a warning bounce back to the user saying
> "unable to deliver mail after 4 hours, will keep trying for 5 days" or
> something to that effect.  End users are always confused by warning bounces,
> and never read them, but just assume that the message failed.  They
> then send another message - which typically compounds the problem or delay.

interesting.  Again, faulty assumption on my part.  I thought the 
temporary failure was to tell the local sendmail (i.e. the one calling 
milter) that it was to queue up the traffic on behalf of the milter.  it 
is starting to sound more and more like I need to build a system that 
takes the output from milter and stuffs it in a queue before processing 
and after processing, reinject into the e-mail stream.

its beginning to look like I'm going to be far better off (and more mta 
independent) use three "big" mta's.  Two of them will accept e-mail from 
different directions and different conditions, the third will deliver. 
In the middle, I have two simple little proxies that just do all the 
filtering/stamping as appropriate.  yes, performance can be a problem 
but it's solvable.

damm that's painful to discover at this point.

I appreciate all the help you've given me and I will certainly give back 
to code that I have generated if you find it useful.  Unfortunately, I 
can see how the milter interface really isn't the right tool for 
techniques like hybrid sender pays.

---eric


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