[Mimedefang] Feature request: Tar pitting.

[David F. Skoll]

On Mon, 19 Apr 2004, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:

> As a public service, I would like to tar pit connections delivering
> various worms or spam.

This feature will never make it into MIMEDefang.  Tarpitting needs to
be done at the Sendmail level, or (more appropriately) at the kernel
level.

By the time you've invoked a Perl milter, you've lost.  The spammer is
sitting with special ratware that can run tens of thousands of
concurrent SMTP threads, and you're using a 20-MB Perl process to try to
slow down *one* of his threads.

Tarpitting is basically useless if you intend to slow down a spammer.
Tarpitting is possibly useful if you have a very large site and want to slow
the rate of spam coming into your site until you can update filters.

Regards,

David.