Bug#398224: Re: This is a design flaw

Dominic Hargreaves dom at earth.li
Tue Feb 8 18:55:27 UTC 2011


On Mon, Feb 07, 2011 at 09:47:38PM +0000, Matthew Wakeling wrote:
> Let's face it - greylistd is a horrible little hack, with all sorts of  
> problems. It works for a few people (like me), most of the time, but it 
> is far from the wonderful one-step-install it should be.
>
> I dislike the way it keeps the database in memory, and has no safe  
> mechanism for committing changes to disc. I dislike the nasty auto exim  
> config altering script. I dislike how several options (like singleupdate, 
> see bug #502460) don't really seem to do what everyone thinks they do, 
> and none of the possible configurations do exactly what everyone wants. I 
> dislike the way MessageLabs fails to try my secondary MX when it gets a  
> greylisted response. Other people dislike the fact that other senders 
> *do* try the secondary host, bypassing the greylisting. I dislike the way 
> most of the options are extremely poorly documented.
>
> I don't have time at the moment to work on a proper replacement for  
> greylistd, however my feeling is that it should probably be part of the  
> main exim package (probably a configuration switched off by default), and 
> maybe sqlite is the way to go. As long as we are munging the exim config  
> file for our users, that's a disaster waiting to happen.
>
> Food for thought. Sorry I'm putting my foot in without actually offering  
> any help.

Not at all, you've expressed some of the concerns I already have, and
have lend weight to the fact that maybe it's not really worth while
maintaining the package. I also don't particularly care for greylisting
per se, but provide it as an option for users.

What I might do, then, is continue with some small maintenance updates
(see what I've already done at
<http://git.debian.org/?p=users/dom/greylistd.git> for example), then
file a wishlist bug for the integration of a pure-exim solution. Once
that exists, we can add a deprecation message to the greylistd package
with a view to removing it.

Dominic.

-- 
Dominic Hargreaves | http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/
PGP key 5178E2A5 from the.earth.li (keyserver,web,email)





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