Stop inbound

[Scott Silva]

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AP wrote:
> Hey Guys,
>
> Is there a way that I can shutdown the reception of mail to the inbound
> queue while still allowing MailScanner to process what's currently in the
> inbound queue and still allow the delivery of mail in the post-processing
> queue?
>
> I know that I could turn off port 25 on the Firewall to the specific mail
> gateway but I would like to do this on the Mail Gateway itself.
>
> Here's my reason.  We sometimes early in the mornings (3-4am) get directed
> SPAM attacks that loads up our primary mail gateway.  Our inbound queues
> can get quite large and the primary mail gateway will continue receiving
> the mail without regard to how large the inbound queue is getting.  We can
> sometimes get 3000-5000 messages in the inbound queue while our secondary
> mail gateway is practically idle.
>
> I was thinking that I could write a mailqin monitoring script that would
> poll the queue every 5 minutes and if it has reached some kind of
> threshold, say 500-1000 messages, it would then stop the receiving of
> inbound mail until MailScanner had processed the queue down to some
> minimum, say 100 messages, before it would start back the receiving of
> mail.  That way the secondary mail gateway would start taking on some of
> the load and we could avoid some of the message delays that we get because
> of the backlog.
>
> Our primary and secondary mail gateways are fairly heavy duty boxes, Server
> class with dual hyper-threaded processors and lots of memory so it is not
> that the boxes are underpowered it's just that the secondary box is being
> under utilized.
>
> Any thoughts or suggestions would be welcome.  If there is a better way to
> handle this I would be interested to know.
>
> Thanks,
>
> AP
>
If you are running on a RedHat or equivalent you could just run;
service MailScanner stop
service MailScanner startout
or run the equivalent on the init script with full paths.
And then service MailScanner startin
when you want incoming again.
Maybe a better idea would be to try some type of blacklist at the MTA
level like sbl+xbl if it won't kill too much legit mail. That list alone
kills 80% of my spam in the US.

--
"If you have ever eaten crow,
It don't taste like chicken!!"

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