Re: [courier-users] Viewing the backscatter blacklist?

[Sam V. <mr...@co...>]

Lloyd Zusman writes:

> How do I view the list of addresses that have been put into my
> backscatter blacklist?  A friend of mine is suddenly getting "556
> Address unavailable" messages now that I have upgraded to
> 0.48.2.20050130.  I'm not sure, but it looks like this person might have
> incorrectly ended up in that backscatter blacklist.
> 
> I'd like to see the current contents of that list before I issue
> any "courier clear" commands.

Well, the log files are kept in $localstatedir/track, which should be the 
/usr/lib/courier/var/track directory, under the default configure script 
options.

Now, what's in there isn't actually a list of blacklisted addresses.

First of all, it's the _recipient_ addresses that are blacklisted, not the 
sender's addresses.

If Courier is unable to deliver mail to user@localdomain, it's going to 
blacklist user@localdomain and won't accept any more mail for this address, 
until whatever the problem is, is fixed, or the blacklisted address expires. 
If you've got something that keeps getting a temporary delivery failure, its 
retries will keep the address blacklisted until the problem is fixed. If 
something got a hard delivery error, that address is going to get 
blacklisted for two hours.

So, have you friend tell you what address he was sending mail to, then grep 
the mail logs to see what errors caused the address to get blacklisted.

In localstatedir/track you will find, basically, a log of timestamp failed 
deliveries.  The individual files are in chronological order.  Each line 
contains a timestamp, the delivery status, and the E-mail address.

Note that not every E-mail address you will see actually means that that 
address is presently blacklisted.  For one thing, the timestamp might be 
expired, but that file hasn't been cleaned up yet.  For one thing, the 
E-mail address might already have had a successful delivery, which clears 
the E-mail address (a succesful delivery for the same address is listed, 
with a later timestamp).

Oh, and thanks for testing this code.