advice on anti-spam tools
Gary Kline
kline at tao.thought.org
Wed Apr 4 21:24:49 UTC 2007
On Wed, Apr 04, 2007 at 03:09:07PM -0500, Dan Nelson wrote:
> 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.
>
What I got caught on was "client," altho from the context,
here ``client'' seems to mean the mail-server-sending-spam.'
In the unix world, my server is the client--unless the
client-server model is different with email. Another reason
I didn't reinstall is that an hour seems far too long. A few
to <= 15 minutes seems closert to what a spammer just wouldn't
bother with. Thanks for your insights!
--
Gary Kline kline at thought.org www.thought.org Public Service Unix
More information about the freebsd-questions
mailing list