--On 13 September 2010 11:38:39 -0400 "John R. Levine" <[email protected]> 
wrote:

>> --On 13 September 2010 10:19:05 -0400 "MH Michael Hammer (5304)"
>> <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> I agree that if a signing domain publishes discardable then the MLM
>>> should discard it.
>>
>> If the message is unsigned, right? Otherwise, it should reject it at
>> SMTP  time (actually, that might be done by the MTA rather than the
>> MLM). In fact  the MTA should reject (at SMTP time) rather than discard
>> such messages,  I think.
>
> If it's signed, I agree there's little downside to rejecting it.  But
> since they said it's discardable, there's little advantage to doing so,
> either.

No, there really is an advantage. The sender gets to see that they've tried 
to do something that they can't.


> A disadvantage is that it requires the SMTP daemon to do a lot of work,
> do the whole DKIM validation and ADSP lookup before deciding whether to
> reject. You can discard any old time, no need to do it while the TCP
> session is open.

No need to, but we do *all* our message scanning, including AV and 
spamassassin at SMTP time, because we (a) don't like generating bounce 
messages, (b) don't like blackholing, (c) think that spam mailboxes act 
like blackholes, and (d) don't want to deliver malware anyway. It doesn't 
take a huge resource to do this quite quickly, especially if you reject 
early on RBLs.

Authentication mechanisms like DKIM and SPF might allow us bounce some 
messages, but really it's simpler to do everything while the TCP session is 
open. We have four very old OSX servers doing this, but one could cope with 
the load reasonably well.

>
> R's,
> John



-- 
Ian Eiloart
IT Services, University of Sussex
01273-873148 x3148
For new support requests, see http://www.sussex.ac.uk/its/help/


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