Milter-greylist

I am about to start using milter-greylist and I'm already using 
spamassassin with MySQL for the bayes and auto-whitelist and preferences. 
So I was wondering if anyone had this in the works.

Also, what sort of database does milter-greylist currently use?

TIA

-- 
Time flies like the wind. Fruit flies like a banana. Stranger things have  .0.
happened but none stranger than this. Does your driver's license say Organ ..0
Donor?Black holes are where God divided by zero. Listen to me! We are all- 000
individuals! What if this weren't a hypothetical question?
steveo at syslang.net

On Thu, May 19, 2005 at 10:29:16AM -0400, Steven W. Orr wrote:
> I am about to start using milter-greylist and I'm already using 
> spamassassin with MySQL for the bayes and auto-whitelist and preferences. 
> So I was wondering if anyone had this in the works.
> 
> Also, what sort of database does milter-greylist currently use?

It does not use a database, it stores the state in memory and regularly
dumps it do disk to resume operation after a crash.

There is no plan to use an external database (what do you win?).

-- 
Emmanuel Dreyfus
manu@...

I realize that this isn't exactly what you were thinking when talking 
about using SQL, but we have all of the whitelist/blacklist rules dumped 
from SQL on a regular basis onto the tail end of the conf.  (everytime a 
rule is changed...)  So in our case, we would win instant changes rather 
than having end-users waiting 10 mins for their changes to take effect.

More directly related to where you were going with the memory/db dumps, 
being able to dump/sync/update ram from a central db would be a solution 
for the fact that even with the sync feature, the servers seem to get 
out of wack with regard to each other.  Think 6 servers, acting as one, 
where periodically a server is taken down for a bit for maintainence, 
etc.  If it could populate the tables in RAM from SQL on startup, then 
sync changes with the SQL server at given intervals, it could be pretty 
handy.

Just throwing it out there.  If I actually thought it was worth the time 
to code it, I would have done it already.  ;-)

Cheers,

~Ethan B.



Emmanuel Dreyfus wrote:

> On Thu, May 19, 2005 at 10:29:16AM -0400, Steven W. Orr wrote:
> 
>>I am about to start using milter-greylist and I'm already using 
>>spamassassin with MySQL for the bayes and auto-whitelist and preferences. 
>>So I was wondering if anyone had this in the works.
>>
>>Also, what sort of database does milter-greylist currently use?
> 
> 
> It does not use a database, it stores the state in memory and regularly
> dumps it do disk to resume operation after a crash.
> 
> There is no plan to use an external database (what do you win?).
>

Ethan Burnside <burnside@...> wrote:

> I realize that this isn't exactly what you were thinking when talking
> about using SQL, but we have all of the whitelist/blacklist rules dumped
> from SQL on a regular basis onto the tail end of the conf.  (everytime a
> rule is changed...)  So in our case, we would win instant changes rather
> than having end-users waiting 10 mins for their changes to take effect.

Yep. centralized whitelist would be nice. Using some mecanism offering
rundandcy (DNS, LDAP) would be nice.

But I won't code that before months, I have other projects. 
 
> More directly related to where you were going with the memory/db dumps,
> being able to dump/sync/update ram from a central db would be a solution
> for the fact that even with the sync feature, the servers seem to get
> out of wack with regard to each other.  Think 6 servers, acting as one,
> where periodically a server is taken down for a bit for maintainence,
> etc.  If it could populate the tables in RAM from SQL on startup, then
> sync changes with the SQL server at given intervals, it could be pretty
> handy.

The problem is that a centralized DB means a single point of failure. I
designed the MX sync with the idea that you can kill any server without
killing the whole.

-- 
Emmanuel Dreyfus
http://hcpnet.free.fr/pubz
manu@...

> I am about to start using milter-greylist and I'm already using 
> spamassassin with MySQL for the bayes and auto-whitelist and preferences. 
> So I was wondering if anyone had this in the works.

We're using milter-greylist on a handful of small (hundreds of users)
mail servers as well as SpamAssassin, j-chkmail and Clam-AV and are
planning to enable to greylisting on the central mail service (tens
of thousands of users) next week.  We have been using greylisting on
the secondary MX for our central mail service for months and have
noticed a significant decrease in spam as a result (spam and viruses
often target non-primary MX holders).

I have ugly Perl scripts which parse information on greylisting
from the mail log and produce MRTG/RRD style graphs, the results of
which you can see at http://noc.uwaterloo.ca/~dkeenan/greylist.html
The scripts are specific to sendmail's log format.

--
Dawn Keenan
Information Systems and Technology, University of Waterloo
Waterloo, ON

First I like the current design. Although I don't know, if it scales
to extreme sizes, but my application wont be that large.


--- In milter-greylist@yahoogroups.com, manu@n... wrote:
> Yep. centralized whitelist would be nice. Using some mecanism offering
> rundandcy (DNS, LDAP) would be nice.

I think, some #include-like feature would be helpful first. (I don't
ask for it, I'm just throwing it in here!)
The included file could be put on a high available networked
filesystem or so.

It would even allow for simple things, like putting the default
whitelist with all those broken servers in its own file, which then
can be updated more easily.


    Elrond

Elrond <yahoo.com@...> wrote:
 
> I think, some #include-like feature would be helpful first. (I don't
> ask for it, I'm just throwing it in here!)
> The included file could be put on a high available networked
> filesystem or so.

Yes, include file would be nice too. 

-- 
Emmanuel Dreyfus
http://hcpnet.free.fr/pubz
manu@...

What do you mean by extreme sizes?  I have around 100k entries in my db, 
not a lot i'd think.  What's the largest greylist db that someone is 
running in production?

ray

On Thu, 19 May 2005, Elrond wrote:

> First I like the current design. Although I don't know, if it scales
> to extreme sizes, but my application wont be that large.

-ray <ray@...> wrote:

> What do you mean by extreme sizes? 

I doubt milter-greylist can scale to gmail or hotmail size, but that's
not a problem: if hotmail starts using greylisting, spammers will start
working it around. :-)

-- 
Emmanuel Dreyfus
Le cahier de l'admin BSD 2eme ed. est dans toutes les bonnes librairies
http://www.eyrolles.com/Informatique/Livre/9782212114638/livre-bsd.php
manu@...

manu@... wrote:
> Elrond <yahoo.com@...> wrote:
>  
> 
>>I think, some #include-like feature would be helpful first. (I don't
>>ask for it, I'm just throwing it in here!)
>>The included file could be put on a high available networked
>>filesystem or so.
> 
> 
> Yes, include file would be nice too. 
> 

I'd love to see include, too.  Then, I can have a web-based program that 
lets my users opt-in and opt-out. The web script will write to a 
database and another program will generate the include files on a 
regular basis on all of our MX servers.

-- 

    Steve