SKEM 1.0.1 review
DownloadThe skem utility is a sendmail milter, that checks and maintains a list of whitelisted, temporary banned, and permanently blacklisted
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The skem utility is a sendmail milter, that checks and maintains a list of whitelisted, temporary banned, and permanently blacklisted IP-addresses.
How you obtain the entries is up to you, but the included logwatcher, module provides one possibility.
The list is stored in a directory (see the -C option), each entry being a file (usually zero sized) or a symlink (usually a "broken" one).
Such entries are stored efficiently (within the directory itself) and the directories are searched using the hash tables on modern file systems. At the same time, they can be listed, added, and removed with the simple ls, touch 1 and rm.
The current release considers the following attributes of each entry:
mtime The time of creation
mode Setuid means the entry is "white-" and setgid -- "blacklisted".
ctime The time, this blacklisted entry last tried to contact us. Keeping this record allows for
periodic purging of blacklist of the IPs not seen in a while, to keep the list from growing
indefinitely.
This milter does not itself filter spam, instead it memorizes the verdicts issued by your other anti-spam defenses to reduce the system load and resource consumption, by temporarily rejecting the relays suspected of spamming (banned) and, optionally, by permanently rejecting the relays "convicted" of spamming (blacklisted).
The idea is to stem the spam from real spam sources, while reducing the ill effects of false-positives to merely delaying, rather than rejecting future messages.
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