On 1/23/2013 4:33 PM, Jon A. wrote:
> Today, a Google Apps user sent a message with two recipients to us,
> one with TO and other a CC internal mailing list.  Naturally, Google
> treated each as an independent message.
> 
> Over the course of an hour or so, because Google attempted to
> deliver the messages using different outgoing hosts, postscreen
> rejected the message(s) ~20 times, with a service unavailable, as
> we'd expect and normally want.
> 
...
> Comments/Thoughts/Suggestions?


I think the usual way is to use postscreen in non-blocking mode for
a couple weeks to build up the temporary whitelist.

The default cache time for successful after-220 tests is 30 days;
that's probably sufficient for the majority.  A very low volume
server might need to cache longer.  The DNS blocklist test will only
cache for 1 hour, but that won't tempfail mail and shouldn't need to
be changed.

If you want to proactively whitelist google's servers, they publish
SPF records so you don't have to spend much effort hunting them
down.  The postscreen access list is IP-only and can't use client or
sender domain names.  And you've already added a bunch of their
servers to your cache.

I don't bother with trying to whitelist big senders, and I don't
think many other folks do either. The big senders usually end up in
the the cache by themselves pretty quickly, and the
once-every-30-days refresh isn't particularly intrusive.  You just
got caught in a situation where an important mail came through
before the whitelist had a chance to populate.



> Management(TM) saw the CC'ed reply, but hadn't gotten the original message.  
> This has caused some concern.


I probably repeat once a week to folks around here something like:
"The mail protocol standards are heavily weighted towards not losing
mail rather than instant delivery, and sometimes mail is unavoidably
delayed.  Much of this is outside our control.  Either the delayed
message will eventually arrive, or the sender will get a notice that
it was not delivered."




  -- Noel Jones

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