From: Ward, Martin (Martin.Wardcolt.net)
Date: Tue Oct 02 2007 - 03:40:16 CDT

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> > I ask because I have a number of mail servers that regularly have
mail
> > queues 300,000 emails and a lot of these queues are bounces and
> > double-bounces. Right now I have a simple script that someone wrote
> > (possibly it even came with the Postfix installation since I didn't
> > perform the installation) which runs the "postqueue -p" command,
> > grep/awks out the message ID of the unwanted emails and runs
> > "postsuper -d" for each ID.
>
> EEEEKS!
>
> Don't accept mail for bogus senders, so that you don't have
> to send bounces later!
>
> Talk about fixing the wrong problem at the wrong end!
>

Unfortunately I didn't design or implement this system and I have
to work with what I have been given, a complete rewrite of the
System is not going to happen! As for bogus senders, this is
something that will be looked at but how can I verify them?

1. DNS check of the mail domain, but mail domains are easily
   faked.
2. SPF. Not implemented widely enough to be useful, but is
   certianly one thing I will be looking at.
3. Forward/reverse resolution of the name/IP address of the
   sending server is not a good test by any means given the
   number of hosts that will route emails for other domains
   (my company offers such a service).

How else can I use Postfix to verify the sender address?

> The postqueue command takes long because it has to examine
> every queue file. There is no way that you can speed that up
> except by strong the entire mail queue metadata in a database.
>

Yes, I was afraid that was the case. I wanted to see if there
was programmatic access to the postqueue/showq functionality
so that I could at least limit the amount of processing involved
In generating a list of mail senders.

Thanks for your thoughts.

|\/|artin

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