my other FREQ of the day

[Julian Field]

At 11:10 16/02/2003, you wrote:
>On Sunday, Feb 16, 2003, at 01:58 US/Pacific, Julian Field wrote:
>>At 23:38 15/02/2003, you wrote:
>>>3) somewhat related to #1 is that you cannot reject messages based
>>>upon
>>>results.  You can try to bounce them, after the fact, but that isn't
>>>reliable (because you cannot trust the return addresses).  I'd rather
>>>reject them outright.
>>
>>That's your MTA's job.
>
>Yes, it should be the MTA's job, but the decision about what to reject
>depends upon (or, in an ideal world, would involve) the results of what
>Mailscanner has found.  Sort of a chicken and the egg thing --
>mailscanner wont make a decision until after the MTA has accepted the
>message, but if mailscanner finds something bad, then the MTA might
>want to reject the message ... except that it already accepted it.

As you cannot trust the return addresses, the only thing you could do
(other than deliver it, obviously) is to discard the message. And you don't
want to do that until all the spam+virus tests have been done. So you would
achieve the same effect by setting the outgoing queue dir using a custom
function. This would do whatever checks it wanted to on the message, and
then possibly produce an outgoing queue dir that is "special". This
"special" directory would have no "queue runner" process, but instead a
little cron job that just deletes everything in the directory every hour or so.

This would have the effect of throwing away the messages if they meet
various criteria of your choosing, which I think is what you are trying to
achieve. It would only take a few minutes to set up. Take a look in
CustomConfig.pm for example Custom Functions, and all the properties of a
message are listed at the start of Message.pm. If you know what you want to
do, and are prepared to pay me for my time, I'll write it for you if you
can't do it yourself.
--
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
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