* * * * *
                                        
                              The Email Situation
                                        
About that email issue [1] … 

Our problems all stem from the greylist daemon [2] I wrote. Or more
specifically, the interaction between the greylist daemon [3] and sendmail
[4]. Or even more specifically, the greylist daemon [5] and the milter
library [6]. 

As far as I can tell, the problem is: customer uses [DELETED-Lookout-DELETED]
Outlook or [DELETED-Lookout, Exploit!-DELETED] Outlook Express, configured to
use SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) AUTH [7]. Sendmail hands the
authentication off to some other process, which okays it, then sendmail hands
the request off to the greylist daemon, which, since it's coming from a
foreign address, of course greylists it, and the customer gets an error
message from [DELETED-Lookout-DELETED] Outlook or [DELETED-Lookout, Exploit!-
DELETED] Outlook Express that says, “Try again later!” 

And then we (or our resellers) get a call. 

Sigh. 

What I would like is for sendmail to skip the greylist daemon if SMTP AUTH is
being used, but I'm not sure how to apply the clue-by-four to sendmail. 

That's separate from the issue that spammers seem to be clueing in to
greylisting and are finding ways around it … 

Arg! 

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2008/03/21.1
[2] http://www.x-grey.com/
[3] http://www.x-gray.com/
[4] http://www.sendmail.org/
[5] http://www.x-grey.com/
[6] https://www.milter.org/
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMTP-AUTH

Email author at sean@conman.org

.