sendmail 8.13.0 and GreetPause kills spam, viruses

[Jeff A. Earickson]

You can set things on a per IP/domain basis in your access.db file
via entries like:

GreetPause:127.0.0.1     0

which means "wait zero milliseconds".  The rightmost number is
milliseconds, not seconds.  So you can tune for different sites.

Jeff

On Mon, 21 Jun 2004, John Rudd wrote:

> Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2004 05:32:41 -0700
> From: John Rudd <jrudd at UCSC.EDU>
> Reply-To: MailScanner mailing list <MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
> To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> Subject: Re: sendmail 8.13.0 and GreetPause kills spam, viruses
>
> 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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