moving DNSBL to MTA

[Michael Masse]

I currently have both sendmail and MailScanner set up to use the Spamhaus and BRBL blocklists. I am trying to get away from MailScanner doing DNSBL lookups to get better performance. The problem I'm having is that sendmail seems to skip quite a few incoming emails for some reason. It does catch a lot so I'm fairly certain it's configured in sendmail properly. I'm noticing that a lot of email gets past the MTA DNSBL stage and then gets caught at the MailScanner stage. Has anyone ever seen this? What could cause it? They are both pointed to the exact same blocklists. I've triple checked that. I can't get rid of it within MailScanner till I know why the MTA seems to be skipping some emails.

[Glenn Steen]

This all sounds more like a BL/Sendmail question... the only
inefficiency concerning mailScanner and DNSBLs is that the lookups
(with more than one BL defined) is serial, while most MTAs tend to do
these things in parallell.
I suppose you already employ a caching nameserver (local to your
MailScanner host(s))? Failing to have that could put a bit of pressure
on your link and/or your upstream DNS servers... All depending on
actual mail volume, of course.

It's not completely impossible that at the time Sendmail queries the
DNSBL, the BL simply does not contain the affected IP, but when the
message eventually is processed by MailScanner ... it does.
Do you have any hard numbers on the frequency of the "error"? What
volumes are we talking about?

Cheers
--
-- Glenn

Post by Michael Masse
I currently have both sendmail and MailScanner set up to use the Spamhaus
and BRBL blocklists. I am trying to get away from MailScanner doing DNSBL
lookups to get better performance. The problem I'm having is that
sendmail seems to skip quite a few incoming emails for some reason. It
does catch a lot so I'm fairly certain it's configured in sendmail properly.
I'm noticing that a lot of email gets past the MTA DNSBL stage and then gets
caught at the MailScanner stage. Has anyone ever seen this? What could
cause it? They are both pointed to the exact same blocklists. I've
triple checked that. I can't get rid of it within MailScanner till I know
why the MTA seems to be skipping some emails.
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--
-- Glenn
email: glenn < dot > steen < at > gmail < dot > com
work: glenn < dot > steen < at > ap1 < dot > se