[MlMt] SMTP Timeout

[Bill Cole]

On 5 Sep 2014, at 13:40, Brad Knowles wrote:

> On Sep 5, 2014, at 12:13 PM, Bill Cole 
> <mmlist-20120120 at billmail.scconsult.com> wrote:
>
>> There are inherently hard problems with transparent SMTP proxies, 
>> some of which can be avoided by carefully harmonizing proxy & MTA 
>> settings. There's probably more hope for making ASSP work than 
>> Cisco's knob-free kludge.
>
> The solution to the Cisco problem is to just turn it off, because it 
> breaks so many things.

YES. I did not intend to imply otherwise.

>> CAVEAT: I have made my living for over 2 decades in part by managing 
>> mail servers, have spent some of that time highly focused on spam, 
>> and my primary email address has a remarkable amount of spam (and 
>> little else) directed to it, so my preferences are more than slightly 
>> biased by an immersion that makes me blind to ease-of-use.
>
> I'm in the same boat, having been fairly seriously embedded in the 
> anti-spam/ASRG/Zorch community for years, starting in the mid-90s when 
> I was the Sr. Internet Mail Administrator for AOL and my primary 
> responsibility was building their anti-spam defenses.  However, I've 
> been out of touch from that community for a while now.

You forgot to mention: one of the most uniformly respected and liked 
participants in the often prickly  history of that community.

[...]
>> My favorite server-side tool stack is Postfix, MIMEDefang, and 
>> SpamAssassin. MD is a 'milter' that can also be used with Sendmail 
>> and anything else implementing Sendmail's milter interface.
>
> I haven't looked closely at MIMEDefang, but I have heard good things 
> about it.
>
> One of the things I'm most proud of is that I was involved in the 
> postfix community from the days back when Wietse was still calling it 
> "VMailer", and I've known Ralf Hildebrandt and Patrick Koetter for 
> years (they're the authors of "The Postfix Book").  I was fortunate 
> enough to be able to draft them into helping me manage the mail system 
> for python.org, and I've learned a lot from what I've seen them do.
>
> So, I'm definitely on board with the postfix+SpamAssassin solution, 
> although I've tended to go with amavisd-new as the interface between 
> the two.  I've liked the fact that amavis integrates with both 
> anti-spam and anti-virus tools, and that there are a number of 
> anti-virus tools available for use with it.

Many people use MIMEDefang for AV as well, via Perl's File::VirusScan 
bundle (written by the same author.) I don't do that myself because 
there is nearly nothing for AV to catch after spam filtering and content 
policies that MD itself can enforce cheaply, such as "no stacked or 
executable filename extensions in attachments."

The main reason I use MD instead of amavisd-new (which has a much bigger 
Postfix audience) is that my first Postfix system was one I migrated 
from Sendmail with MIMEDefang already in place. It is probably true that 
amavisd-new would be a better choice for many people since it has a 
larger community of Postfix users and a longer history of use with 
Postfix. There are no compelling capability or performance differences 
between MIMEDefang and amavisd-new that I know of, although they hook 
into Postfix quite differently.

[...]
> All my custom rules that I've developed for Mail.app is another 
> hurdle.  It would be really nice if I didn't have to re-invent all 
> those wheels for MailMate.

That's the heaviest lift for almost everyone I've evangelized to 
MailMate, no matter what MUA they are coming from. Unfortunately, I 
think a rule importer would be a massive time-sink to implement 
usefully.