Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Now Using Greylite

In this old post, I spilled the beans on my new and improved spam filtering triple play: dspam, qgreylist and RBL checking. Overall, the system has worked well over the last four months, though I have noticed the increasing volume of spam showing up in my spam folder.

I suspected that the very simple form of greylisting implemented in qgreylist was the culprit, and after a bit of investigation, I found out that this indeed was the case. So, I set out to see if there was another greylisting implementation which could be used in my qmail installation.

Using my google-fu, I quickly zeroed in on Greylite. After reading up on it, I found that it held several advantages over qgreylist:
  1. Written in C instead of perl, so it should perform a bit snappier and be less of a burden on the mail server.
  2. Instead of only considering the IP address of the sender as qgreylist does, greylite considers the complete triplet of {IP address, from, to} before validating an IP address.
  3. All data is stored in a single sqlite3 database, whereas qgreylist stored the verified IP addresses as files in a single directory, which clutters the filesystem and increases access time in that directory as more IPs are validated.
  4. Greylite appears to have some enhanced functionality called `tuning suspicion' which allows you to customize how it behaves in certain circumstances.
To install it on my debian box, I first had to install sqlite3 (and the associated development libraries). Then, I downloaded the source code and followed the simple directions that came with it.

Less than 5 mintues later, and the server was up and running with its new greylisting implementation up and working perfectly. Flawless victory!

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Baseball Season Update

So, here we are over two weeks into our little league baseball season - how is our team doing? Well, we have 0 wins and 4 losses, so one could make the argument that we are not doing too well. I would have to agree.

The kids seem to be having a good time, however. So long as they continue to enjoy the game and improve over the course of the season, I'll be content. Wish us luck!