Re: FWTK and smap/smapd

[Rick Murphy <rmurphy () mitretek org>]

At 08:20 AM 7/17/2002 -0700, Roger Marquis wrote:
> The drawback to smap's anti-relay and anti-spam features is that
> they are limited.

In what way are they limited?

> That and the fact that the code has such a small
> user-base, few contributors, no discussion list, and is not being
> actively maintained.

I can't determine the user-base size, and will agree that the contributor 
list is small. That's driven more by the license than anything else, I 
suspect. There is a discussion list (yes, it's not specific to smap). I'm 
not sure what you mean by "not being actively maintained" - I'll assume you 
don't intend that as an insult :-) (I will agree that fwtk isn't being 
actively developed by anyone. It is, however being actively supported.)

> Patches in particular are subject to little
> or no code review.

No argument. Actually, all of fwtk badly needs a review. Too bad it's not 
open-source - we'd potentially have a much larger developer base. (It 
couldn't get much smaller.)

> Postfix's smtpd is essentially smap on steroids.  All the security
> advantages plus several additional features (whitelists, header
> checks, message size limits, various rate limits, recipient checks,
> ...).  See the mailing list and smtpd man page for details.

Other than rate limits, smap can do all the above - whitelisting, 
sender/recipient/domain-based denies, DNSBL support (either marking 
incoming messages with a warning header or denying them), etc. Even with 
that, smap doesn't compete because postfix has one unbeatable advantage - 
it's being actively developed and is widely used.

> >The spam-rejection capabilities are pretty broad -
> >there's things I can do to block spam with smap that qmail and postfix
> >can't do.
>
> Smap does something that Postifx doesn't?  What would that be?

Answered earlier.
        -Rick

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