Subversion Repositories greylisting

Frequently Asked Questions:

  (This list will be added to as more are discovered)

Installation Questions:

Q. Why am I getting a "Inappropriate ioctl for device" error when trying to
   configure the milter to use sendmail's access db?

A. This is most likely an incompatibility between the Berkeley DB libraries
   that perl/tie/DB_File are compiled with or using, and the version that 
   sendmail's makemap program was compiled with.  Make sure that the 
   libraries/versions match, or disable the access db checking.


Q. I've customized my sendmail to use special mailers in certain cases.
   But any mail received by these mailers are bypassing the checks with
   this message: "Mail delivery is not using an smtp-like mailer.  Skipping 
   checks."

A. If you are using customized (or custom named) mailers in your sendmail
   config, then you probably want to set $force_all_mailer_checks, or those
   mailers will be considered "special" and will bypass the greylisting 
   checks.  By default, only mail received with the "*smtp"  and "local" 
   mailers is checked.
   
   If you have some custom mailers that need to be checked and some custom
   mailers that shouldn't be checked, then you will need to modify the milter 
   source to include the names of these special mailers in the checks.
   Just add the name of your mailer to the checks on $mail_mailer.


Q. When trying to run the milter, I'm getting errors like "Attempt to free 
   unreferenced scalar".

A. Several versions of Redhat and Suse shipped with non-threadsafe versions
   of the perl mysql modules.  Try upgrading to the most uptodate versions
   of the DBD mysql modules for your distrobution, or use the ones from 
   CPAN.

Q. I'm trying to use PMilter instead of Sendmail::PMilter for with the 
   relaydelay code, but I'm getting errors about getsymval and missing 
   macros.

A. PMilter seems to have a bug regarding not preserving macro info from 
   previous callbacks even though it should.  According to Susan Barnes,
   though the developer of PMilter has promised to fix this problem, 
   it can currently be worked around by adding this line to your 
   sendmail.mc:

   define(`confMILTER_MACROS_ENVRCPT', confMILTER_MACROS_ENVRCPT``, {i}, {auth_type}, {auth_authen}, {auth_ssf}, {auth_author}, {mail_mailer},{mail_host}, {mail_addr}, {if_addr},  {_}'')dnl


Operational Questions:

Q. How do I make sure that mail from certain sources or to certain addresses 
   is never delayed?

A. Put whitelisting records in the db.  The xlist.pl script is provided to
   make this easier.  Almost always, you will want to whitelist servers, and
   to do that, simply put a whitelist record with their ip address in the db.
   If you have a special account or class of users where low latency of email 
   is more important than spam protection, then add a "to" whitelist.
   NEVER (really, I mean NEVER) whitelist on the from address.  You may want
   to blacklist on the from, but never whitelist, since it is easily forged.
   Run xlist.pl with no arguments to see some example use info.

   An alternate way of whitelisting is to put appropriate records in the 
   sendmail access db (if you've configured the milter to support it).  
   While the access db is a perfectly acceptable way of doing it, you will 
   lose the tracking information that gets stored if the whitelist info
   is in the db, which may be useful to you later.