Re: [gentoo-user] Setting up SMTP relay

[Mick]

On Monday 24 January 2011 01:22:09 kashani wrote:
> On 1/23/2011 4:26 PM, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> > Apparently, though unproven, at 02:02 on Monday 24 January 2011, kashani
> > did
> >
> > opine thusly:
> >> On 1/23/2011 12:20 PM, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> >>> It manages it's own queues beautifully. But, and this makes me sad, it
> >>> doesn't really want *me* to manage it's queues. Border controls are
> >>> hard, and finding the 1,000 mails some idiot with a Windows bot just
> >>> sent, and deleting them, is really hard.
> >>>
> >>> I'm redesigning our mail setup at work,a nd I'm going to do it with
> >>> exim *and* Postfix. Exim is the front end I can see, work with, and
> >>> manage. Exim sends on to Postfix as fast as it can, and Postfix
> >>> transparently relays to recipient. I get best of both worlds :-)
> >>>
> >> 	I can't say I've ever needed anything more than mailq | grep |awk  |
> >>
> >> postsuper -d - in order to delete mail from the Postfix queues. What
> >> sort of things are your trying to do other than delete a lot of spam or
> >> bounces?
> >
> > First, our internal mail system deals with about 3,000,000 mails a day
> > Mon-Thu so grep | postsuper is a tad inadequate, even if just on the
> > basis of volume
> >
> > The basic tools are fine as long as you understand what they are dealing
> > with - raw text. As soon as you run mailq you have text, you no longer
> > have intelligence about what that text means. So you need lots of
> > grep-fu.
> >
> > I can't control what the users mail out, sometimes they have automated
> > systems that do silly things like send 10,000 notifications an hour to
> > an SMS gateway when they cocked up Nagios. Finding the dodgy ones is no
> > fun when there's a lot of perfectly valid ones in the mix too, and grep
> > doesn't help much other than blindly selecting text matches.
> >
> > There's lots more examples, but they all follow a similar theme.
>
> 	Thanks for the extra detail, I found what you're describing very
> interesting. I've never dealt with Postfix with more than a couple
> hundred internal users and more often as spam our customers system.
> Other than the occasional Nagios blasts I haven't had to deal with much
> of this.
> 	In regards to controlling what users send is it feasible to use a
> policy server for rate limiting them? The ability to use an extra lookup
> service to decide whether to access main, filter it, allow relay, etc is
> one of the things I think Postfix does well. However I suspect the
> management and hand holding of a rate limit system would create more
> overhead than cleaning out the queue periodically.

[Off-topic] Can't you set up nagios to only send out a single alert when a 
monitored variable goes down - can't remember the parameter off hand but 
that's what I did when the default nagios setting proved to be too trigger 
happy for the users' needs.

-- 
Regards,
Mick