problems with BLU mail?

[blu at vl.com (Tom Metro)]

Jerry Feldman wrote:
> ...the outgoing queue had well over 2000 messages in it...
> I restarted postfix a few times and deleted a bunch of messages on
> the postfix mailq that had a bad address.

I'm wondering if you have a configuration or tuning problem with your 
Postfix setup, as bad addresses shouldn't clog up the queue for the rest 
of the messages.


>Tom Metro quoth:
>> Assuming all of the lists reject senders who
>> aren't subscribers, that should take care of most of it.
>
> Nearly all of our lists reject mail from non-subscribers, but much of
> that mail tends to stack up in the pending request queues for each
> list.

Right, and that's because the way such messages are normally handled is 
that they get fully received, queued, and then feed to the mailing list 
software for processing. I speculated:

>> (A Postfix policy server could be created to reject such emails
>> during the SMTP transaction - even before mailman gets the
>> message.)

This would entail writing some software to grab the subscriber lists 
from all mailing lists and put them in a database (if they aren't 
already in a database of some sort that can be quickly queried), and 
then writing a small policy server that would lookup the envelope sender 
in the database, and accept the message, or return a reject code. (A 
policy server is just a small daemon that Postfix queries during the 
SMTP transaction. It could be as simple as a dozen lines of Perl code.)

This would keep the junk out of the inbound queues, and avoid the waste 
of sending bounces to bogus or forged addresses.

It wouldn't surprise me if someone in the mailman community has already 
put together a solution like this.


> One of the more difficult is officers because we want non-members
> to post to it, but because of SPAM I've even closed that one. 

It isn't ideal, but you could always use a web form to accept postings 
from non-subscribers. (Even BLU might benefit from having an "Ask the 
BLU community" box on its web site to accept inquiries. We seem to 
currently get these via direct email sent to officers listed on the site.)

  -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/

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