[H-GEN] Re: Spam Assassin

[Robert Brockway]

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On 25 Oct 2002, Jason Parker-Burlingham wrote:

> > I brought my home mail server to its knees by dropping 100 messages (kind
> > of accidentally) into the queue simultaneously.
>
> Ah, perhaps that is the salient difference.
>
> I'm running exim (standalone) as my MTA; after receiving 100 messages
> in a "short" period, the daemon will simply queue messages and not
> deliver them locally at all until a period of time has passed.

Sendmail can be configured for different delivery methods.  Queue or
deferred will give this behaviour for all mail - ie, hold mail until the
next queue run.  Deferred mode delivery won't even do any dns checks on
the mail before dropping it in the queue, so in this case a bounce message
caused by incorrect addressing will occur at the next queue run and not
immediately as it would with any of the other delivery methods.

Deferred mode is great of boxes that are connected only part of the time
(like non-permanent modem connections) as the box just accepts the mail
and only like tries lookups & delivery.  When I had a non-permanent modem
connection I used deferred mode delivery and a sendmail -q running from
the ip-up scripts that run when pppd is established.  This made offline
mail sending seemless.

> Were you running the network-based tests (vipul razor, RBL, etc.)?

Yep.  Still do too :)  The main problem was the thrashing though, not a
significant increase in network traffic.  As I mentioned in my last email,
spamc/spamd did 35,000 emails without breaking a sweat on the same
hardware & software configuration.

Cheers,
	-Rob

-- Robert Brockway B.Sc. email: robert at timetraveller.org  ICQ: 104781119
   Linux counter project ID #16440 (http://counter.li.org)
   "The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens" -Baha'u'llah


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