We recently downloaded SpamFilterISP and are currently doing tests with it.  We are a website design company that hosts sites and e-mails for several companies and would like to migrate off of our existing spam solution that uses sendmail/spamassassin/etc on a Linux platform.

Installation went fine, and some tests have come through successfully. 

We're having an issue with gmail clients being able to send mail to us.  I looked through the forums, and saw a couple of other posts related to this, and it appears to have to do with greylisting.

If I understand correctly, when a mail comes in from gmail if the IP isn't on the greylisting "whitelist" it's told to check back in X minutes determined the greylisting setting.

Apparently, gmail does try back at whatever time interval the gmail servers are set to try back at - but is most likely coming from a different IP address.  Eventually this mail gets bounced back enough that it doesn't come through and the sender receives an undeliverable e-mail.

We would like to know if anyone has found a way to to whitelist all gmail sending IP's.  I know it can't be done by ranges from a previous post, but is there a way to import these into the database perhaps? 

Or has anyone else found a solution to this issue?

Thanks,

Dave

Thanks for the quick response.

So I guess our options are to add the 65,000 IP addresses that gmail supposedly sends from:

216.239.32.0/19
64.233.160.0/19
66.249.80.0/20
72.14.192.0/18
209.85.128.0/17
66.102.0.0/20
74.125.0.0/16

And these have to be added individually, correct?  We can't add blocks of IP addresses from what I saw in other forum topics.

Or turn off greylisting - but this is still an effective way to block spam, right?

Has anyone else found a good resolution for this other than these two options? 

Thanks again,

Dave


Roberto,

I often feel the delay of having to wait.  I know every time I sign up for an online service I am going to have to wait an extended period of time... knowing the email will come in 15 minutes or maybe an hour (or sometimes the next day).

Greylisting is doing what it is supposed to be doing though, just having it on the server keeps the CPU load levels down quite a bit by keeping the trash connections from even getting to the server.

I suspect there may be a suitable comprise, such as allowing individual IP addresses as well as a class C.  That reduces the number of entries people have to make and should still keep the complexity of the lookups down.

I don't know how SpamFilter works internally, but I have noticed that IP Addresses are all stored in 123.456.789.123 format in the databases.  When dealing with IP addresses I find it much quicker to store them as a numeric base 10 value - some binary format is probably much better than that.

Roberto is the master, and knows what spamfilter is doing behind the scenes but maybe storing the values in a different format would allow a speed improvement enough to allow some additions of range based lists.

Another option might be to maintain two lists in memory for the greylists, one of just IP's and another of class C network ranges etc.  You just need to search two lists, and you know the format of the addresses in both so mixing of IP's vs. Class C list searches should not cause big problems.

I also vote for some type of  shared list among servers.  If you have a cluster of spamfilter servers the issue of inbound greylisting gets even worse, causing even longer delays.  Imagine a cluster of 4 servers, some external server connects to server 1, gets rejected.  The next time it tries it connects to server 2, then a different server from their cluster tries and gets server 3.  Could take a very long time before the message gets through.

I'm happy with the grey listing at the moment though.

WebGuyz wrote: Understand you want peak performance, but the reality is that we need to be able to compensate for these large farms of smtp gateways, as well as handling greylisting sharing amongst multiple SFE's.

My greylist file on the primary server has 200k, and the backup server has 66k.  These have all been automatically added, we have not put in any manual entries.

Within the next 24/36 hours we'll have an early beta for SpamFilter (both Standard and Enterprise) that allows the entry of IP wildcards (ex. 192.168.255.* or 192.168.*) in the GreyListAllowed.txt greylist file. You may contact us at support at logsat.com if you wish to test it before it's released on our website (please include your order number in the email so we can verify the current software maintenance).

LogSat wrote: Within the next 24/36 hours we'll have an early beta for SpamFilter (both Standard and Enterprise) that allows the entry of IP wildcards (ex. 192.168.255.* or 192.168.*) in the GreyListAllowed.txt greylist file. You may contact us at support at logsat.com if you wish to test it before it's released on our website (please include your order number in the email so we can verify the current software maintenance).

Great news Roberto!

Thanx!!

Roberto,

We're currently testing the software (see original post :))  Would like to know if we can get a copy of this beta so I can try and get it approved for purchase.

Thanks!

Dave