[Mailman-Developers] MTA Integration (was PHP Wrappers?)

[Robby Griffin]

On Nov 21, 2005, at 05:25, Ian Eiloart wrote:

> OK, the MTA should ONLY accept email that it can deliver.

FWIW, Mailman currently avoids doing anything about this for a 
documented reason (scripts/post):

     # Immediately queue the message for the incoming qrunner to 
process.  The
     # advantage to this approach is that messages should never get lost 
--
     # some MTAs have a hard limit to the time a filter prog can run.  
Postfix
     # is a good example; if the limit is hit, the proc is SIGKILL'd 
giving us
     # no chance to save the message.

The extent of sanity-checking it does before queueing the message is to 
make sure the requested list exists, which is purely a file existence 
test and involves no list-locking or interpretation of the list 
configuration.

If you were able to adjust the MTA's filter timeout or perform the ACL 
check from within the MTA itself and not from a filter program, this 
might be a moot point. But I suppose you would still need to worry 
about SMTP conversation timeouts in the client. Whatever you do to vet 
senders has to be fast and nonblocking to work for large lists.

Also, keep in mind that it should obey the various admin options for 
allowing mail from some nonmembers, holding mail from some nonmembers, 
the default action for nonmembers, etc., as well as whether to restrict 
nonmembers at all, in which case I think it needs some understanding of 
Mailman internals and not just access to the roster.

	--Robby