Re: [gentoo-user] Setting up SMTP relay

[Alan McKinnon]

Apparently, though unproven, at 09:00 on Monday 24 January 2011, Mick did 
opine thusly:

> 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.

I could do that for my Nagios instance, but don't want to. My Nagios instance 
is well-behaved, there are others which are not so much.

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com