RBL checking

[Rose, Bobby]

But my thought was that if a message was tagged because of a RBL result
of true, that it could skip sending it thru SA.  That way it completely
avoids doing the SA rbl check thru net::dns.  Also it allows us to rely
on your RBL check which appears faster than SA's.  It doesn't matter
that a sender host may not be in an RBL db, SA will still check.  I
frequently see messages on the SA list that states that net::dns is a
performance problem with SA. So avoiding it would be good.  

-----Original Message-----
From: Julian Field [mailto:jkf at ECS.SOTON.AC.UK] 
Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2002 12:01 PM
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: RBL checking


At 16:43 28/02/2002, you wrote:
>I think the question was:
>
>What happens if the RBL check in mailscanner fails?  Does MailScanner 
>still call SpamAssassin?  or is the message "tagged and sent on?"

It still does both checks. Some of my users only auto-filter mail that
has been tagged as spam by the RBL lists as they prefer to ignore the
results of SpamAssassin. This means I have to do all the checks.

Also, it won't make much difference to the speed, as a very small %-age
of mail in any batch of messages is caught by the RBL checks, so
virtually all the mail would still have to go through SpamAssassin
anyway.

>I assume that once a message is tagged as SPAM, no further checks are 
>performed.  So by setting the RBL flag on or off in SpamAssassin 
>shouldnt make a difference if MailScanner has already labeled the 
>message as SPAM.

No. See above.

>Julian Field said:
> > At 16:35 28/02/2002, you wrote:
> >>Julian, if Mailscanner does an RBL check does it still pass the 
> >>message off to SpamAssassin in which case it's checked again along 
> >>with content?  Or is it just tagged and send on?  Our queues got 
> >>really large last night and I've had to disable SA checking until 
> >>they clear out.  I was wondering if RBL checking was happening in 
> >>both mailscanner and sa on the same message.
> >
> > I have my SpamAssassin user_prefs file say
> > skip_rbl_checks 1
> > which fixes it.
> >
> >>Also what is mailcanner using for the reverse dns lookups if it 
> >>doesn't use net:dns module like SA does?  Just wondering if the SA 
> >>guys could use the same process and ditch net::dns.
> >
> > I just use gethostbyname(). Seems fast in some tests I've been doing

> > this afternoon. I was thinking about starting to use Net::DNS (as it

> > can do DNS lookups in background), but the time taken to do it with
> > gethostbyname() just wasn't worth trying to optimise. The real delay

> > was all the processing the SpamAssassin does, not the DNS lookups.
> > --
> > Julian Field                Teaching Systems Manager
> > jkf at ecs.soton.ac.uk         Dept. of Electronics & Computer Science
> > Tel. 023 8059 2817          University of Southampton
> >                             Southampton SO17 1BJ

--
Julian Field                Teaching Systems Manager
jkf at ecs.soton.ac.uk         Dept. of Electronics & Computer Science
Tel. 023 8059 2817          University of Southampton
                             Southampton SO17 1BJ