Re: [gentoo-user] Setting up SMTP relay

[Alan McKinnon]

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.

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com