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Re: Question about Qmail relating to MX retry processing

To: Uncle George <qmail@gatworks.com>
Subject: Re: Question about Qmail relating to MX retry processing
From: Marc Perkel <marc@perkel.com>
Date: Mon, 27 Nov 2006 21:15:48 -0800
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Uncle George wrote:

I'm not sure that's the case. It just means the those who use qmail AND (have bad reverse lookup OR are on a dynamic IP address) will not be able to send email to my domains UNLESS I whitelist their host.

I guess i'm at a loss here. Exactly how would trying each MX record in turn prevent your filtering techniques from processing reverse lookups, or dynamic ip's.

but the guy is correct. qmail is owned by one person, and is not likely to change. The followers of qmail, I think, would have adopted such a MX strategy, if it was *exactly* spec'd that way into one of their mandatory patches.


I process about 4 million messages a day. As you know graylisting is a popular spam fighting technique and gets rid of spam using 4xx errors and counts on the fact that spam zombies don't retry. But greylisting has its drawbacks like delaying good email. So I don't use it.

What I do instead is sort of selective graylisting targeting dynamic IPs and bad RDNS. But instead of delaying them for a long time with graylisting I only use the tem error on the lowest IP and accept it on the next highest IP. And this works for all MTAs except qmail that will keep trying the lowest MX till it times out.

But - it only happens to qmail users with dynamic IPs or bad RDNS. And I can add IPs to a braiddead hosts list to bypass it if someone complains.



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