Milter-greylist

On Wed, Feb 21, 2007 at 12:00:33AM -0800, Tom Hedges wrote:
> I have received little response from the author on this list, 
> although I greatly appreciate the quality of his code. I suppose the 
> French and Americans think "Vous est merde", although I suspect we 
> really appreciate each other more than that (I hope).

I'm really surprised you could feel that way about our exchanges. While
it's true I could endlessly rant about US administration's behavior
(though I never did that on that list), I never confused US administration 
with US individuals. And I did not even noticed you were an amercian citizen,
anyway. 

> Anyway, I will continue to offer ideas, however poorly they might be 
> received...

They are not poorly received, it's just that I'm working on something else
right now, and I have little time for implementing new stuff. Your idea
makes sense and I think we can have it as a global setting disabled by 
default. Provide a patch against CVS for that (don't forget documentation),
and I will integrate it. If you did it already, then I have let it slipped
through and I own you apologies, just resend it until I handle it. 

Alternatively you can wait I get some free time for doing that work, but 
if you go that way, don't hold your breath on it. 

> milter-greylist can offer invaluable data regarding what the "magic" 
> number of delay minutes is before purging a greylist entry. By 
> recording the time when an entry enters the the greylist, latest time 
> it was accessed, versus those entries that were auto-whitelisted; a 
> histogram might be constructed to optimize the greylist timeout 
> period. I would assume this would offend no one, and would give each 
> user an insight into how long it takes to get spam-bot's to give up 
> versus the annoying delay joining new BBS's, etc.

If I understand correctly what you need, then perhaps the stat feature
can output the information you need:

stat ">>/var/log/greylist.stat" "%S %i %f %r %E %R\n"

For each handled message, you'll get a line with the following substitution:
%S the action (accept, tempfail, reject)
%i sender IP address
%f sender e-mail address
%r recipient e-mail address
%E Elapsed time since first delivery attempt
%R Remaining time before the message gets accepted

See greylist.conf(5) for other possible substitutions. There is a lot of
information you can gather that way.

-- 
Emmanuel Dreyfus
manu@...