9 messages in net.sourceforge.lists.courier-usersRe: [courier-users] RBL Check - When?
FromSent OnAttachments
Gordan BobicOct 20, 2007 12:45 pm 
Sam VarshavchikOct 20, 2007 1:03 pm 
Gordon MessmerOct 20, 2007 1:44 pm 
Gordan BobicOct 20, 2007 4:03 pm 
Leigh S. Jones, KR6XOct 20, 2007 4:56 pm 
Gordan BobicOct 20, 2007 5:26 pm 
Leigh S. Jones, KR6XOct 20, 2007 5:34 pm 
Gordan BobicOct 20, 2007 5:50 pm 
Alessandro VeselyOct 21, 2007 11:11 pm 
Actions with this message:
Paste this link in email or IM:
Paste this link in email or IM:
Atom feed for this thread
Paste this URL into your reader:
Subject:Re: [courier-users] RBL Check - When?Actions...
From:Gordon Messmer (yiny@eburg.com)
Date:Oct 20, 2007 1:44:26 pm
List:net.sourceforge.lists.courier-users

Gordan Bobic wrote:

I've just been looking through my mail logs to assess the effectiveness of the RBLs, and I see things like the following:

courieresmtpd: error,relay=::ffff:88.236.181.253,from=<admi@bobich.org>,to=<he@bobich.net>: 511 http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=88.236.181.253

Should a legitimate message be rejected by RBL, it's useful to have those logs. Users will ask why they haven't received a message they expected, and you can look for the senders address in the logs to see if RBLs are at fault.

Since it has the from and to addresses listed, that implies that the RBL was consulted after the MAIL FROM and RCPT TO commands were sent. Is this not wrong? I would have thought that in the interest of wasting fewer resources on spammers, RBL should be checked sooner.

No, the DNS lookup happened at the beginning of the connection. smtpd just doesn't give errors until the RCPT command. smtpd won't accept messages (errors on DATA command), and as far as I know doens't even look up the addresses requested, so the resources consumed are a handful of bytes (rate limited by tarpitting). It's nothing to worry about. :)