On 1/23/2011 4:26 PM, Alan McKinnon wrote:
Apparently, though unproven, at 02:02 on Monday 24 January 2011, kashani did
opine thusly:
On 1/23/2011 12:20 PM, Alan McKinnon wrote:
It manages it's own queues beautifully. But, and this makes me sad, it
doesn't really want *me* to manage it's queues. Border controls are
hard, and finding the 1,000 mails some idiot with a Windows bot just
sent, and deleting them, is really hard.
I'm redesigning our mail setup at work,a nd I'm going to do it with exim
*and* Postfix. Exim is the front end I can see, work with, and manage.
Exim sends on to Postfix as fast as it can, and Postfix transparently
relays to recipient. I get best of both worlds :-)
I can't say I've ever needed anything more than mailq | grep |awk |
postsuper -d - in order to delete mail from the Postfix queues. What
sort of things are your trying to do other than delete a lot of spam or
bounces?
First, our internal mail system deals with about 3,000,000 mails a day Mon-Thu
so grep | postsuper is a tad inadequate, even if just on the basis of volume
The basic tools are fine as long as you understand what they are dealing with
- raw text. As soon as you run mailq you have text, you no longer have
intelligence about what that text means. So you need lots of grep-fu.
I can't control what the users mail out, sometimes they have automated systems
that do silly things like send 10,000 notifications an hour to an SMS gateway
when they cocked up Nagios. Finding the dodgy ones is no fun when there's a
lot of perfectly valid ones in the mix too, and grep doesn't help much other
than blindly selecting text matches.
There's lots more examples, but they all follow a similar theme.
Thanks for the extra detail, I found what you're describing very
interesting. I've never dealt with Postfix with more than a couple
hundred internal users and more often as spam our customers system.
Other than the occasional Nagios blasts I haven't had to deal with much
of this.
In regards to controlling what users send is it feasible to use a
policy server for rate limiting them? The ability to use an extra lookup
service to decide whether to access main, filter it, allow relay, etc is
one of the things I think Postfix does well. However I suspect the
management and hand holding of a rate limit system would create more
overhead than cleaning out the queue periodically.
kashani
