sendmail 8.13.0 and GreetPause kills spam, viruses

[John Rudd]

On Jun 21, 2004, at 4:47 AM, Jeff A. Earickson wrote:

> Now I'm waiting for the phone to ring about complaints.  I'll
> let you know if GreetPause causes any.
>

Does sendmail give you some ability to whitelist sites?  Because there
are SOME sites that just don't wait long enough.  smtpout.mac.com
(which is a block of addresses), for example (for mac.com email users
sending out their messages), wont wait very long (sometimes as little
as 5 seconds, some times as much as 19).  I think prodigy is another.

For my sendmail wrapper script (which listens via inetd, checks if
they're in a special whitelist, and if not does an SBL and XBL check on
the connecting address, and then pauses for 30 seconds to see if they
wont wait), I had to add smtpout.mac.com's block of addresses to my
whitelist (because one of my wife's 3 or 4 email addresses is a mac.com
address).  I also had a friend file a bug with Mac.com about it, but I
don't know if anything came of that.  They're not technically wrong
(it's a SHOULD and not a MUST requirement in the RFC), but it's
annoying that they're not willing to wait.

Otherwise, it IS a great feature.  It weeds out tons of spam and
viruses.  I've come across some doubters who think it will be a
temporary fix, which I'm ok with.  In the long run, it does modify the
economics of the situation (by lowering their throughput), which may be
enough to weed out some of the people who are trying to make money
through spam.

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