Weighted smtp policy daemon
Beta, Documentation incomplete
policyd-weight [-option] [-option2 <arg>] command
policyd-weight(8) is a SMTP policy daemon written in perl(1) for postfix(1). It evaluates based on RBL/RHSBL results, HELO and MAIL FROM domain and subdomain arguments and the client IP address the possibility of forgery or SPAM. It is designed to be called before the SMTP DATA command at the RCPT TO stage. This way it is a) possible to reject a mail attempt before the body has been received and b) to keep multirecipient mail intact, i.e. provide the functionality of selective usage based on recipients.
To make policyd-weight(8) work with postfix(1), it is required to add a system account for $USER (default: polw)
Policyd-weight can operate in master.cf or daemon mode. In master.cf mode it uses postfix' spawn(8), which results in number of simultanous requests perl instances. In daemon mode it uses shared memory and forks on load, and only if all child processes are busy.
At the time of writing the man-pages for policyd-weight assume a postfix installation. It has been reported that policyd-weight works with other MTAs like Exim, too.
policy unix - n n - - spawn user=polw
argv=/usr/bin/perl /usr/local/bin/policyd-weight
smtpd_recipient_restrictions =
permit_mynetworks,
... authenticated permits ...
reject_unauth_destination,
... whitelists, role accounts, clients ...
check_policy_service unix:private/policy
start the daemon with policyd-weight start. Poliyd-weight then listens on $TCP_PORT (default: 12525) for policy requests. To make postfix talk to that port do following changes to main.cf:
smtpd_recipient_restrictions =
permit_mynetworks,
... authenticated permits ...
reject_unauth_destination,
... whitelists, role accounts, clients ...
check_policy_service inet:127.0.0.1:12525
It is possible to have more than one postfix server talk to the daemonized policyd-weight by configuring each postfix machine to query the policy server with check_policy_service inet:IP:12525 where IP is the host on which policyd-weight runs.
Please note that check_policy_service should come at last, or at least after reject_unauth_destination, or else you may become an open relay.
Following commands exist and are reserved for daemon mode only:
Not for use in master.cf. In debug mode everything is reported on STDOUT instead of syslog(3). Also an own debug cache daemon will be spawned. The socket-file is named after the value of $SPATH with ".debug" as suffix.
Pass a configuration file to policyd-weight
Not for use in master.cf. Together with -d this kills the debug cache daemon. Without -d it kills the global running cache daemon.
Not for use in master.cf.
Logging is done via syslog(3) with facility "mail" and priority "info". For a complete list of log entries and their correspondending configuration parameters refer to policyd-weight.conf(5).
Please report bugs to [email protected]
Ralf Hildebrandt (Author of the Book of Postfix) is the spiritual father of policyd-weight. It was his idea to have a scored RBL evaluation, I've added the weighted MAIL FROM/HELO DNS-evaluation. For that purpose I used Meng Wong's spf.pl which was shipped with the postfix source as example.
/etc/policyd-weight.conf, Policyd-weight configuration file /etc/postfix/main.cf, Postfix configuration parameters /etc/postfix/master.cf, Postfix daemon processes
policyd-weight.conf(5), Policyd-weight configuration file master(5), Postfix master.cf file syntax postconf(5), Postfix main.cf file syntax access(5), Postfix SMTP access control table
GNU General Public License
Robert Felber <[email protected]> Autohaus Erich Kuttendreier 81827 Munich, Germany