On Tue, 8 Nov 2005, Ronan wrote: > If SA cant be accessed at during the sata ACL check, can i defer the > message
If you want to! There's the slight benefit that some hit-and-run spammers won't bother to retry. However, if this situation is arising frequently, then (if the mail server is otherwise reasonably dimensioned) could it be that you're allowing too many spams to get to that stage? Spamassassin is, in our experience, the largest single consumer of resources in the processing of a message which is finally accepted - if you can apply rules which reject a sub-set of spams at an earlier stage, especially at the RCPT phase before they get as far as sending DATA, then it can make very significant savings on the mail server resource usage. > or simply queue it until my spamd server is ready to accept it? Once you've accepted and queued a mail for further processing, you can no longer safely reject it (see "collateral bounces"). As a matter of policy, we don't care for the idea of dropping mails automatically into a black hole: we want to either positively accept, or positively reject. > Should i be using the same approach with anti virus solution as > well? Our mailer does not pass anything without a satisfactory anti-virus check - neither inbound nor outbound. If we had users who were doing virus research, of course, we'd need to find a different policy! Beware, though, that passing the anti-virus check does NOT guarantee that mail is clean. We've had several instances where a new virus started arriving several hours before either of the virus checkers[1] received their template updates for that virus. They were only kept out by virtue of the check on filename extensions (which itself is irksome, and not really correct in principle, but effective enough in practice), plus a check for a signature of MS executable content. regards [1] This problem is going to exist with any virus checker, so I'm not intending any criticism of the ones that we use. -- ## List details at http://www.exim.org/mailman/listinfo/exim-users ## Exim details at http://www.exim.org/ ## Please use the Wiki with this list - http://www.exim.org/eximwiki/
