Spillover queue (was RE: [Mimedefang] Quarantine based on con tent)

Clayton, Nik [IT] nik.clayton at citigroup.com
Wed Aug 6 09:05:01 EDT 2003


> So basically after a few hours all the undeliverable spam bounces are 
> moved to the 1day queue where i can just forget about them.  

Something that's probably not well known is that Sendmail has a bunch
of definitions that can be enabled at compile time to switch on additional
functionality.  These are typically indicated with a leading _FFR_ in the
option name (FFR == For Future Release).

One of the ones you can enable on recent Sendmails is _FFR_QUEUERETURN_DSN.
Do this with a line like:

     APPENDDEF(`conf_sendmail_ENVDEF', `-D_FFR_QUEUERETURN_DSN=1')dnl

in your site.config.m4 file and then recompile.

This gives you two new timeout options, one to set the timeout before
warning messages about DSN non-delivery are generated, and one to set the
timeout before DSN non-delivery messages are bounced.

Since the default for this is 4 hours and 5 days respectively, you can do
something like this:

    define(`confTO_QUEUEWARN_DSN', `2h')dnl
    define(`confTO_QUEUERETURN_DSN', `2d')dnl

in your .mc file to set them them 2 hours and 2 days.  So a non-deliverable
DSN (e.g., you've bounced a spam, and the envelope sender address is
non-existent) will only stay in the queue for 2 days.  Other 
non-deliverable messages will use whatever timeout you've set.

Another useful _FFR_ option is _FFR_BLOCK_PROXIES, which causes Sendmail 
to look for non-SMTP commands at the beginning of the SMTP session which 
are indicative that the remote end is a poorly configured HTTP proxy 
which is being used to relay spam.

Note that _FFR_ options may not exist between different versions of 
Sendmail, and may be removed entirely in later versions.  The code is,
by definition, unsupported, so I recommend you're comfortable with the
Sendmail source code before you come to rely on this.

N
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