Testing sendmail greet

Testing sendmail greet_pause FEATURE

Scenario: we are considering implementing the sendmail greet_pause FEATURE, but we do not want to actually reject connections while we gather statistics (e.g. legitimate domains to whitelist, optimal greet_pause value).

By commenting out two lines in srvrsmtp.c in the sendmail source, and rebuilding and reinstalling sendmail, we can simulate the greet_pause FEATURE and log its results without actually rejecting commands sent in the SMTP session.

The following steps were performed on a sendmail 8.13.6 installation.

1. $ cd sendmail-8.13.6/sendmail

2. Edit srvrsmtp.c, and change:

#endif /* _FFR_LOG_GREET_PAUSE */
                                greetcode = "554";
                                nullserver = "Command rejected";
                                sm_syslog(LOG_INFO, e->e_id,
#if _FFR_LOG_GREET_PAUSE

To:

#endif /* _FFR_LOG_GREET_PAUSE */
/*                              greetcode = "554";
                                nullserver = "Command rejected";*/
                                sm_syslog(LOG_INFO, e->e_id,
#if _FFR_LOG_GREET_PAUSE

3. $ ./Build

4. $ cd ..

5. # ./Build install; /etc/init.d/sendmail start

6. Enable the greet_pause FEATURE, and configure the access database accordingly. sendmail will log the greet_pause rejection, but will allow the SMTP session.

May 8 16:52:48 hostname sm-mta[14141]: [ID 801593 mail.info] k48LqmfX014141: rejecting commands from [192.168.1.1] [192.168.1.1] due to pre-greeting traffic

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Testing sendmail greet_pause FEATURE

Last modified: 2006/05/08