[Mimedefang] New Sober version bringing MD to its knees?

[Fernando Gleiser]

One of my clients has 40+ email accounts. At the gateway I'm runing 
sendmail 8.13.3 and mimedefang 2.54 on FreeBSD 5.4-p8. The gateway is a 
Pentium III 700MHz qith 512MB RAM. For such a small system it was more than
enough.

It worked flawlessly until the last version of sober hit it a couple of
days ago. Since then that piece of cr*p is hitting it with bursts
where the server gets 60+ mails in less than 10seconds, so MD runs out
of slaves. If I increase the number of free slaves I get to the point
where MD uses so much memory that the systems gets overloaded, and the
slaves gets killed in the busy timeout.

So, no matter what I do I end with a denial of service in the mail gateway

To mitigate the problem I've written a perl script that scans the maillog
and adds the offending sender to the access database if I get more than 30
viruses with that sender.

I know that's not optimal, but I don't know what else i can do to prevent
that work from killing the server. Any other help/ideas will be greatly
apreciated.


 		Fer