[colug-432] Emailing COLUG list

[R P Herrold]

On Thu, 8 Oct 2009, Rob Stampfli wrote:

> I realize this is going to be unpopular because it involves work,
> but it could be automated and I'm willing to provide the script
> if you are willing:  Why not extract the membership lists from
> your mailing lists and formulate a grey-milter exception for
> these addresses?

Straightfoward, and actually I do part of this monthly anyway 
(dump all MM ML subscriber lists) so I can determine when a 
desub happened with diff

The operative script is now at:
 	http://www.colug.net/manifest-mailman.sh.txt
that generates the raw material.

The target milter-greylist is >= milter-greylist-4.2.2-2orc 
build on the project at:
 	http://hcpnet.free.fr/milter-greylist/

with an ACL pass list in its config file like this:

 	racl list list "mailman-users" delay 0m autowhite 1d

The stanza it will reference will be:

# mailman start
# List of users to exempt from greylisting
list "mailman-users" rcpt {  \
         user1 at example.com \
         user2 at example.com \
         user3 at example.com \
}
# mailman end

I'll be adding it to an hourly cron, at first most likely. 
We'll see if the load goes too high with lots of entries

Go for it -- if under a suitable FOSS license, I'll certainly 
look at any suggestions

Obviously the markers are what I will auto-manage the 
/etc/mail/greylist.conf file from -- I dont _think_ it has 
'include capability ... yet


Yes, I know that the purist will blanch at the
> suggestion because email addresses can be forged, but the reality
> is that they hardly ever are forged for the purpose of sending
> spam to lists.  (Yet!)
>
> Another alternative would be to simply whitelist the domain
> "gmail.com".  I suppose it is conceivable that someone could
> put establish an rDNS record to impersonate gmail, but I'm also
> fairly confident Google would make quick work of them if they
> did.

not sure that I want that rDNS load for every piece of mail a 
second time, and more importantly, I think that a domain based 
'lookup' on the last hop sender in the whitelisting does NOT 
do that presently.  I think it rather does textual comparisons 
on the From address's asserted domain.  I may be wrong.

> Sometimes it's easier to plow around the stumps.

perhaps -- running code will talk, of course.

- Russ herrold