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--On 8 June 2006 11:37:33 -0400 Barry Warsaw <barry@python.org> wrote:
In fact, for exim, the MTA authors may have to do nothing, it might just be a matter of fixing the configuration. In fact, its conceivable that I could do that already, but I'd much rather know that Mailman developers had some kind of commitment to solving the collateral spam problem. And I'd like there to be a supported method for doing that (an API). At the moment, I ask my list administrators to NEVER automatically bounce (sorry, "reject") messages - and I don't think that's satisfactory.
I certainly agree that the entire email stack has to be defensive about collateral spam. I do believe that scripts could be written that could help an MTA make /some/ decisions about the disposition of an email message lower down in that stack. I'm not even opposed to distributing some with Mailman that have a proven track record, nor am I opposed to refactoring some code and "blessing" some APIs that make this job easier with some guarantees of stability across releases. But I'm not going to write them. :) There really is nothing stopping anyone else from starting to do that now, if you think about the problem in the right way.
That's fair enough. I do have an idea about how to use a python script with Exim. I don't know enough to make it efficient, though. Maybe there's a problem with my python installation, or the way that I invoke it, but it seems that even a simple query takes four or five seconds to run:
rinka-12 # date ; /local/mailman/bin/list_members ian-test4 ; date Thu Jun 8 16:47:09 BST 2006 foo@example.ac.uk bar@example.ac.uk baz@example.ac.uk Thu Jun 8 16:47:13 BST 2006
But, it takes about 0.7 seconds to print "hello world", and truss shows a lot of files being opened just to get a list of members.
Now, my Exim installation makes up to about a dozen LDAP queries to deliver an email. The queries are cached, and my average time to deliver an email is a second or two - and that's including virus a spam scanning.
OK, maybe I should just get on and implement this. If Exim caches the results, then it's not going to be too bad.
-- Ian Eiloart IT Services, University of Sussex