Introduction and Questions

[John Peacock]

INTRODUCTION

I've been using MessageWall as my external SMTP agent and qmail-spamc (which I 
wrote) to tag spam inline to the qmail-queue process, prior to relaying to my 
internal MTA for actual delivery to users.  I am finding recently that simply 
blocking all executable file attachments is not sufficient for AV control, and I 
am unhappy with the lack of modularity of MessageWall (an otherwise good program).

Hence, I am setting up a new MX box with qpsmtpd (thus moving one step closer to 
using Perl for absolutely everthing ;~).  I have hacked at the CVS version of 
spamassassin to support the SA 2.60 Unix domain socket feature (see seperate 
e-mail for patch).  I have written a check_vrfy plugin, so I can just query my 
internal MTA for account information (see second seperate e-mail later today 
after I write some POD).  I need to write a whitelist patch for the dnsbl, since 
I like to run my own internal whitelist.  I will also need to write a uvscan 
plugin (stolen shamelessly from the clamav code, I'm sure), so I can run 
McAfee's antivirus on the MX boxes.

So far, it looks like I'm going to like qpsmtpd!  But I have a few questions:

QUESTIONS

1) I can definitely see the startup time for qpsmtpd under tcpserver being an 
issue, so I'll be using pperl for this in production.  Could I get some feeling 
from people how many prefork processes people are using?  I am running a 
strictly corporate environment with ~300 heavy e-mail users.

2) I don't like mixing the tcpserver configuration variables in with the qpsmtpd 
plugin stuff in config/, so I modified the run file and env/* code from the 
qmail-conf smtpd configuration instead.  Does anyone want to see this?

3) I find it kind of annoying that the config/ file data is not being detainted 
automatically.  Tainting is all well and good, but these files are owned and 
writeable only by root, so they are as good as anything stored on disk can be. 
Anyone else think that $self->qp->config() should untaint the arguments 
automatically?  Or at least that there should be a generic detaint function 
supported in the core routines?

Thanks in advance...

John