sendmail message splitting defeats bandwidth savings?

[Brent Strignano]

Maybe an idea...

Have MailScanner split and resubmit the message, as needed by the rule
sets, to sendmail on the loopback interface before spam or virus
checking happens. Then sendmail can control its own queue numbers and
the message will be single recipient per message for the rest of the
checks.

Thoughts?

Brent Strignano
System Administrator
Granite Capital Holdings
Sidney NY USA



-----Original Message-----
From: Julian Field [mailto:mailscanner at ECS.SOTON.AC.UK] 
Sent: Monday, November 03, 2003 11:50 AM
To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: sendmail message splitting defeats bandwidth savings?


At 16:04 03/11/2003, you wrote:
>On Mon, 3 Nov 2003 10:00:19 -0500, you wrote:
>
> >By contrast what I'd prefer MS to do is: if a message comes in bound 
> >for multiple recipients and only a few of those recipients should be 
> >handled specially (whitelisted), create separate copies of the 
> >message for those recipients, queuing the files into mqueue by 
> >generating its own IDs.
>
>MS should be kept up to date with changes in de qf and df files of 
>sendmail. And it should be able to distinguish between the different 
>sets of changes.

One of the main reasons I haven't done this before is that reading
message filenames is a lot easier than creating new ones. For example,
Sendmail has changed its format at least once that I can immediately
think of, and it is non-trivial to work out (given an empty queue at
startup) which format of filename I should use.

When only sendmail is creating them, it's easy, I just use whatever
filenames it supplies. But if I want to create unique new ones, then how
do I work out what to call them? I need to keep strictly to its naming
scheme so that if the sendmail folks tighten up their queue filename
checking code, everything keeps working. So it's not good enough to
"just do something that works", I have to get it 100% correct.

I also have to guarantee that any new filename I create won't be
possibly re-used later by the MTA. For example...

The queues all start off empty, for simplicity.

A message 1111 comes in, with 2 recipients with different rules, so it
needs to be split. 2222 is a legal name for this MTA, and is not in use
right now. So MailScanner creates 2 output messages 1111 and 2222. Then
the MTA receives another message, which it decides to call 2222 (which
isn't in use in the incoming queue, so I can't stop it doing it).
MailScanner processes that and tries to create another message 2222 in
the outgoing queue, which clashes with the earlier one.

Consider what happens when 2222 has been in the outgoing queue for
nearly a week, and is still waiting to be delivered. How do I stop the
incoming MTA creating a queue file with a name that hasn't been used in
the past week/month/year?

It can't be done.

I welcome comments to the contrary... :-)
--
Julian Field
www.MailScanner.info
MailScanner thanks transtec Computers for their support

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