> It's a war of attrition. There's not much that can be done except to keep

> scaling up the system to cope with the load. It's not only SMTP, for 
> example. DNS server operators, for example, often have no choice but 
> overprovision their bandwidth and CPU to deal with attacks on DNS
servers.

hmmm ... I would think that if the SMTP connection is handled by a program
which does not create a process or thread for each handshake before it has
done a DNS RBL check it would increase the systems resistance to spam waves
dramatically. I mean something like lighttpd which works as a single
process with a single thread and non-blocking I/O. Instead of select, he
used the fastest event handler in the target system: poll, epoll, kqueue,
or /dev/poll. He chose zero-copy system calls like sendfile rather than
read and write. take a look at: http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html 
 
I like courier, it worked for years for me. It is one system for all you
need on a mail server. But it's architecture is vulnerable to spam waves. I
don't want to replace courier with something else, so I send my first mail
with the search for:

- some tuning tips I can use - I've posted the ones I'm using, but maybe
there are others. the dns rbl check fails but the connection is kept open.
Can courier not just drop it?
- possibility to use a proxy which has the above described features and
only lets stuff though which passes the dns rbl checks.
- or anything else I can do with the exception of replacing the hardware or
courier itself.


> But it's really not a problem unless you're maxed out on connections for
a 
> prolonged period of time. SMTP is not instant messaging. If the sender 
> cannot connect, the sender will try again later, so if this goes away
> before 
> long, you won't really have any long term impact.

true, but my monitoring gets wind of it, send sends me an alert - and
monitoring I do need. ;-) 

-- 
Regards,
Robert
-----
Robert Penz

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