Murray S. Kucherawy wrote:
If however there are extant or possible implementations that actually queue a
message for spam evaluation by some other agent, and that's a totally separate
step (even by separate software) than the basic message intake, then it makes
sense to denote that as a state in this context.
My own experience with various MTA implementations is that spam, virus, and
other content evaluation is all part of the intake step, before it hits a queue
where prolonged delay is likely. That's why this is giving me quite a bit of
pause.
Shoveling the message off to another service for evaluation is indeed
rare among stand-alone MTAs, but pretty common in cloud-based
implementations, especially those that use a forest of single-purpose
blades. There are frontends to SpamAssassin that support this as well.
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