hmm. I haven't seen my message that I sent to the amanda-users list come back through in over an
hour. So, I checked the mail.log on our end of things. I see that the original attempt to send was
logged as:
May 10 13:01:25 marlin sendmail[7516]: [ID 801593 mail.info] p4AH1O3u007514:
to=<[email protected]>, delay=00:00:01, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=esmtp, pri=93325,
relay=mx.omniscient.com.
[64.194.244.196], dsn=4.0.0, stat=Deferred: 451 4.3.2 Please try again later
Which is alright. Our server is a legitimate sendmail server and will queue the message and retry.
However, I followed through the logs and found that it tried again at 13:17, 13:32, 14:02, 14:17,
14:32, 14:47 and still being told to try again later(that's East Coast time, USA, by the way). This
seems way extreme. Typically, the only thing you gain by greylisting is the initial blockage of spam
bots that simply don't queue and resend. Thus, if you configure greylisting for a couple of minutes,
you have your maximum benifit/cost ratio. Having it blocking a legitimate mail server for an hour
and half is just silly. I presume once this message goes through, I'll be whitelisted for some time.
But, if I don't post real regularly, it's kind of a pain to have that sort of a delay in a
contribution to a group discussion.
Last attempt I see in the logs is:
May 10 14:47:42 marlin sendmail[18668]: [ID 801593 mail.info] p4AH1O3u007514:
to=<[email protected]>, delay=01:46:18, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=esmtp, pri=723325,
relay=mx.omniscient.com
. [64.194.244.196], dsn=4.0.0, stat=Deferred: 451 4.3.2 Please try again later
Our server (Biology Department) only has one IP address that mail goes out on, so it's not like we
have a cluster with queued mail randomly getting sent from different IP addresses.
What'll be weird is if this email goes through before my first ("Re: man pages for
Solaris").
--
---------------
Chris Hoogendyk
-
O__ ---- Systems Administrator
c/ /'_ --- Biology& Geology Departments
(*) \(*) -- 140 Morrill Science Center
~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst
<[email protected]>
---------------
Erdös 4
