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Re: non-solution

2004-06-24 11:49:57
From: Bill Sommerfeld 

Substantially similar capabilities are present in all of the SMTP
MTA's I'm familiar with.  If a message delivery attempt is rejected
early, only envelope information is logged, but if the message was
rejected in error, that's generally sufficient to identify what needs
to be whitelisted.

Yes, but after you've had them, you find that facilities that log the
fewest few dozen KBytes of SMTP bodies are very valuable.  SMTP envelope
logs are unitelligible to most users, not only because they are terse
but because the SMTP envelope is a mystery to the fewer users that
know about it.  Delaying filter rejections until the SMTP DATA command
and so capturing the message body resolves a lot of complaints of the
form "Why did your idiotic spam filter reject that perfectly good mail
message?"  That can significantly reduce whitelisting requirements.

Logging bodies involve some obvious privacy hassles.  You must keep the
logs private.  The logs can have only censored copies of the envelope
so that recipients can't know who else was sent the same message.


Vernon Schryver    vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com

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