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merlyn (47)

merlyn
  merlyn@stonehenge.com
http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/
AOL IM: realmerlyn (Add Buddy, Send Message)
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PAUSE-ID: MERLYN [cpan.org].
See my home page [stonehenge.com].

Journal of merlyn (47)

Tuesday November 04, 2003
10:32 AM

Spam Fighting moved from MUA to MTA - success

[ #15555 ]
I had been handing $random@stonehenge.com by letting postfix deliver to my procmailrc, which fired up a separate Perl invocation to sort and deliver the mail for each incoming. And test for spam.

The problem is the MIRVs. A lot of mail gets addressed to thereto@stonehenge, barney@stonehenge, merlyn@stonehenge, for about 10 addresses. And this type of spam seems to have greatly increased in the past few months. A burst would come in, and for the next two minutes, I was splitting and forking and SpamAssassin-ing, and loadav would hit 3 or so, and my sublease customers were complaining.

So yesterday, I bit the bullet, and learned about Amavisd, a Perl daemon built around Net::Server, that could pull in SpamAssassin and some virus checkers. I carefully read the "README.postfix" file included in the distro, and set up everything.

Wow, what a difference. Now my postfix/amavisd MTA checks for spam once for the MIRVs, without forking, instead of 10 times with a lot of forking going on. My loadav has never exceeded 0.9! Hooray. Success.

I'm getting about 1 MIRV a minute. Ouch.

My only concern is that the amavisd is started and stopped outside the normal postfix engine, so I'm concerned about what happens when it goes down. (Postfix will just stop, but I won't be around to notice.) I'm thinking of a cronjob entry to just keep restarting it every half hour or so, just in case it fries.


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  • Just do your entire smtpd in perl [develooper.com].

    There's two pieces left to the qpsmtpd puzzle - firstly to have a pure perl server (which I've just checked into CVS, but it's a little premature yet - help would be most welcome since this is an area you have lots of experience in), and secondly to have a pure perl delivery system (perhaps delivering to procmail, but also needs to support onward relaying).

    Sorry, I hate it when people like me suggest a completely different solution to the one you just found that works per
    • There are times when I want a stick shift, and times when I want an automatic.

      For email delivered to $FOO@stonehenge.com, I want an automatic. If it was just my own mail, I'd be happy to play with new tools, and take the risks (and rewards of such).

      I think you can both relate, and agree.

      --
      • Randal L. Schwartz
      • Stonehenge
  • have you tried MailScanner (yet another Perl-wrapper for SpamAssassin) I enjoy it very much and it has auto-recycling and multiple instance and multiple possible MTA. -- dominix
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