mailscanner only sees the envelope TO

Stephen Swaney Steve at swaney.com
Wed Jul 16 17:09:27 IST 2003


What about a MailScanner option that passes delivery of messages to
multiple to a recipients to another program, i.e. procmail?

Steve
Steve Swaney
Steve at Swaney.com

 On Wed, 2003-07-16 at 11:47, Matt Kettler wrote:

> At 08:30 AM 7/16/2003 -0700, Ken Anderson wrote:
> >MailScanner only looks at the envelope TO address, so if your mail
> >server allows messages to have 100 recipients, you have 99 users who
> >can't control what they perceive to be their own email filtering. :-(
> >
> >What is the best way to handle this issue?
> >
> >So far, we've limited the MaxRecipients in sendmail.cf to 10.
> >Users don't send mail out through our MailScanner boxes, so this works
> >reasonably well, since less than 1% of incoming mail is actually
> >addressed to more than 1 user.
>
> Unfortunately, since there's only one message at the transport layer, only
> one action can be taken. It's either whitelisted or not.
>
> SpamAssassin (a tool used by MailScanner) suffers from the same basic issue
> whenever it's called at the transport layer. It looks at the body "To:"
> header (along with some others), and must whitelist if any of the addresses
> are whitelist addresses.
>
> It's unfortunately impossible to magically make one message into many at
> the MTA layer.. It's an inherent drawback.
>
> Of course, you can switch to using tools that scan at the point of delivery
> instead of transport, however those wind up scanning a message once per
> recipient, instead of once, which increases overhead. It's kind of a
> trade-off between flexibility and efficiency.
>
> (Those who call SA from the MDA can force per-user preference files by
> using spamc -u with the name of the actual recipient.)


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