Having spent an interesting evening chatting with Dave from MailChannels, I’ve now spent well over a week traffic shaping SMTP for some 200k connections and it’s time for a few observations:

1. The installer is very Solaris-a-like. I’m not a fan. I do remember a few far worse, but only a few


2. Upgrades are somewhat clunky, since the installer A) takes settings saved in ~/.something rather than the running config (weird) & B) buggers about with your config file removing all those logical line breaks you put in to define sections once you enabled some of the disabled features.


3. I did wonder why the hell it wasn’t a direct replacement smtpd for postfix at one point. XCLIENT functionality might cut the mustard though.


4. FP’d disastrously on a finance site I use quite a bit. I had to whitelist it


5. It annoyed my kids by FP’ing on a very popular music site they use a lot


6. >90% of rejections were RBL related.


7. I’ve a suggestion list a few pages long, but raised enough bugs already. I’m not really a grumpy-old-man


8. It appears not to like the popular catalog shops, this isn’t so much of a problem because I can’t afford the wifes shopping habits at the moment.


9. There is a setting to turn off the feedback & Ken made a change to the license to exclude addressing info but my preference is to opt out on my personal box


10. It appears to be catching less (or I’ve been noticing a lot more) and I’m relying on SpamAssassin more since the upgrade

I’ve a hunch that most of these issues come down to bulkers postmasters setting short timeouts and increasing parallelism to get the greatest bang-for-the-buck-come-instant-gratification from their listservs in the zero hour. Postfix and qmail come with excellent defaults that cope with sods like me greylisitng or traffic shaping spammers connections – don’t fuck with them eh?

This is after all my personal mailhost, it runs a few small spamtraps and a bunch of mailboxes but not scientific empirical datasets. My mailbox has been hard to manage this week and I’m not aware of anything out of the ordinary happening. My public self seeding site is getting more english junk: This week then the same week last month. Pure observation but interesting none the less.

If I had to sum it up: At the moment, I’m sorry to say it’s not as effective as the decent greylisting implementation I was running, it appears to be FP’ing more but nevertheless it has far fewer drawbacks in normal use since the delays appear more usual than the arbitrary 3^rd party retry timeouts greylisting causes. It could be excellent. (Edit: added the dot. Is anyone else trying it? )

The Granddaddy of rejections was very interesting though natwest.co(m|.uk) WTF is going on with all that phish?