advice on anti-spam tools

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Apr 03), Gary Kline said:
> I've been experimenting with greylisting for months.  Not sure the
> regular mail filter installs or not, but the devel version installed
> just now perfectly.
> 
> Is there any tutorial on this or should I just re-read the man pages
> and other docs a few more times!  From llooking at the config file in
> /usr/local/etc/mail, the "retry" seems to default to a #commented-out
> 1h.  Sorry, but I have trouble parsing this kind of grammar:
> 
> <quote>
> # How long a client has to wait before we accept
> # the messages it retries to send. Here, 1 hour.
> # May be overridden by the "-w greylist_delay" command line argument.
> #greylist 1h
> </quote>

I didn't have any problems reading the config file myself.  All the
config file options are also listed in the "greylist.conf" manpage,
too.  Here's what the manpage has to say about the "greylist" keyword:

  greylist

    The argument sets how much time milter-greylist(8) will want the
    client to wait between the first attempt and the time the message
    is accepted. The time is given in seconds, except if a unit is
    given: m for minutes, h for hours, and d for days.  The greylist
    keyword is equivalent to the -w option. Here is an example that
    sets the delay to 45 minutes:

      greylist 45m


A 1 hour timeout could be "too long" for an impatient end-user, so I
have lowered that to 10 minutes.  Most external servers retry at 15 or
30-minute intervals.  I also set the autowhite value much higher than
the default of 3 days (2 weeks), so frequent sending machines never
leave the whilelist.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com