Re: Initial Installation Step 2

[Steve]

On Thu, 2009-06-25 at 16:59 -0700, Andrew Daviel wrote:
> On Thu, 25 Jun 2009, Don Armstrong wrote:
> 
> > [Though in reality, you should really just discard spam messages
> > instead of rejecting them.]
> 
> The whole point of a milter IMO is that you can reject suspicious mail 
> without your MTA generating a message back to a probably bogus return 
> address.
Not if it is done at the SMTP level (my whole purpose for trying this
milter). It gives a 55x before accepting the message so the sending MTA
is aware at that point.

In an era where bounce messages, joe-jobs and backscatter are as bad as
the spam problem itself realistically you have the option to silently
drop (genuine sender never knows in case of FP) or SMTP fail it (genuine
senders knows more or less instantaneously).  I know which of those I
prefer.

It does put a large load on a mail server to do it this way - usually
needing some clustering and powerful hardware in a large production
environment. For a small business (where every mail could mean the
difference between sinking or swimming) it should scale OK. That's what
I'm looking at.