Apparently, though unproven, at 09:00 on Monday 24 January 2011, Mick did opine thusly:
> On Monday 24 January 2011 01:22:09 kashani wrote: > > 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. > > [Off-topic] Can't you set up nagios to only send out a single alert when a > monitored variable goes down - can't remember the parameter off hand but > that's what I did when the default nagios setting proved to be too trigger > happy for the users' needs. I could do that for my Nagios instance, but don't want to. My Nagios instance is well-behaved, there are others which are not so much. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
