A friend just started experiencing delays of a minute or so in the time
it took sendmail on his site to produce any kind of 220-message, so that
many calling SMTP sites timed out and failed to deliver anything.

After the usual head-scratching (of the sort: "But I've changed
*nothing* here!") this was traced to his use of RBLs (Realtime
BlackLists) to block spammers and open relays. This is "a good thing
(TM)" until the day that one of the list sites disappears so that
sendmail hangs while looking for a reply from that site.

If you've had "relays.ordb.org" as one of the RBLs you're using, remove
it from your configuration; it's gone away.

--
JP
==> http://www.frappr.com/cusm <==

In article <20070111202814.GC4301@jpradley.jpr.com> Jean-Pierre Radley <jpr@jpr.com> writes:
$If you've had "relays.ordb.org" as one of the RBLs you're using, remove
$it from your configuration; it's gone away.

Yup; it went away a month or two ago. This is why reputable RBLs
generally have a mailing list to which you can subscribe; ORDB
announced this to its mailing list at about the time it shut down.
--
Stephen M. Dunn <stephen@stevedunn.ca>
>>>----------------> http://www.stevedunn.ca/ <----------------<<<
------------------------------------------------------------------
Say hi to my cat -- http://www.stevedunn.ca/photos/toby/

"Stephen M. Dunn" wrote:
>
> In article <20070111202814.GC4301@jpradley.jpr.com> Jean-Pierre Radley <jpr@jpr.com> writes:
> $If you've had "relays.ordb.org" as one of the RBLs you're using, remove
> $it from your configuration; it's gone away.
>
> Yup; it went away a month or two ago. This is why reputable RBLs
> generally have a mailing list to which you can subscribe; ORDB
> announced this to its mailing list at about the time it shut down.
> --
> Stephen M. Dunn <stephen@stevedunn.ca>
> >>>----------------> http://www.stevedunn.ca/ <----------------<<<
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> Say hi to my cat -- http://www.stevedunn.ca/photos/toby/

On the subject of RBL's: What about Spamassassin users? After seeing
this thread, I checked my Spamassassin 3.1.4 build (greped for ordb.org)
and located files in the build source containing ordb.org:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root sys 177350 Sep 13 10:12 spamd_parallel-spamd.err
with lines like:
spamd_parallel-spamd.err:[18198] dbg: uri: parsed domain, ordb.org
spamd_parallel-spamd.err:[18198] dbg: uri: parsed uri found, relays.ordb.org
spamd_parallel-spamd.err:[18198] dbg: uri: cleaned parsed uri, relays.ordb.org
spamd_parallel-spamd.err:[18198] dbg: uri: cleaned parsed uri, http://relays.ordb.org

And

../t/data/spam/003:SPAM: Hit! (1 point) Received via a relay in relays.ordb.org
../t/data/spam/003:SPAM: [RBL check: found relay 104.6.100.211.relays.ordb.org.]
../t/data/spam/003:SPAM: Hit! (1 point) Received via a relay in relays.ordb.org
../t/data/spam/003:SPAM: [RBL check: found relay 104.6.100.211.relays.ordb.org.]

But nowhere else can I find any reference to relays.ordb.org.

Sept 13 is the date of t/log created when I untared the distribution
archive so the date of the log file does not indicate what's happening
on my system.

Still being a newbe with Spamassassin, I searched the Spamassassin home pages and
found a note that versions since 3.1.1 have sa-update that will go out and get
update information.

Unfortunately, the doc pages on sa-update are completely clear to the author but
don't tell a newbe what he needs to know.

I ran sa-update and it created /var/lib/spamassassin with directory
drwxr-xr-x 3 root sys 512 Jan 15 17:04 3.001004
and containning:
drwxr-xr-x 2 root sys 1536 Jan 15 17:04 updates_spamassassin_org
-rw-r--r-- 1 root sys 2200 Jan 15 17:04 updates_spamassassin_org.cf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root sys 43 Jan 15 17:04 updates_spamassassin_org.pre

Spamassassin runs every day and executing cd /var/lib/; find . -atime -1
indicates that none of the files in /var/lib/spamassassin are being
accessed by spamd.

Any guidance on what needs to be done to actually used the files
downloaded by sa-update?

TIA.


--

Steve Fabac
S.M. Fabac & Associates
816/765-1670

In article <45AFD741.BC124993@att.net> "Steve M. Fabac, Jr." <smfabac@att.net> writes:
$But nowhere else can I find any reference to relays.ordb.org.

To fix this manually, you need to find the rule that does the
relays.ordb.org lookup, and then set the score for that rule to 0. I
believe I use a different version of SpamAssassin than you (since I
was not successful at getting SpamAssassin 3.x to run correctly on
OSR5.0.7 with MP3; I haven't bothered banging my head against this
particular wall since upgrading to MP4) and the version I use doesn't
include this particular blacklist so I had to roll my own rule for it.

The rules which ship with SA are stored in one directory; on my
machine, that's /usr/local/share/spamassassin. grep through
those and you should find the rule and be able to get its name.

It is not a good idea to modify those files directly, as they tend
to get overwritten if you install upgrades. Instead, you should have a
local config file of some sort (in my case, local.cf) in a different
directory (in my case, /etc/mail/spamassassin) with your local config
options. Set the score for this rule to 0 in your local config file
and it will be disabled. If you're using spamd, the config only
gets read when the spamd process starts, so you'll want to kill and
restart spamd.

I can't speak to how sa-update works since I'm not running a
version that has it.
--
Stephen M. Dunn <stephen@stevedunn.ca>
>>>----------------> http://www.stevedunn.ca/ <----------------<<<
------------------------------------------------------------------
Say hi to my cat -- http://www.stevedunn.ca/photos/toby/