Spey 0.3.3 review

Spey is a smart SMTP proxy that provides an easy way to add greylisting to your mail setup. This can dramatically reduce the amoun

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: David Given

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Spey is a smart SMTP proxy that provides an easy way to add greylisting to your mail setup.

This can dramatically reduce the amount of spam you get, which is generally considered to be a Good Thing.

Spey is very simple to set up, efficient to use, and extremely effective.

Why use Spey?

Mainly because it's really easy. Spey is simple to set up, does not require any knowledge of your mail server's usually obtuse configuration system, is small, fast and Just Works.

Why use greylisting?

Because it's an ideal way of dealing with your spam. Greylisting is easy to set up, practically self-maintaining, fast and extremely effective. It requires the sender to verify that it's a real mail server in a way that is RFC-compliant and invisible to normal users, while at the same time punishing abusers of the email system.

In addition, it blocks the spam before the message body is sent, preserving your bandwidth.

It works on email viruses too. Spey has reduced the author's spam intake from 100 messages a day to 3.

It is a simple daemon that listens on the SMTP port. When a remote server connects to it, Spey connects to your real mail server and starts relaying the SMTP transaction. While it does so, it monitors the SMTP conversation.

Once it has collected enough information to decide whether to greylist the message or allow it to proceed, it will either hijack the connection, rejecting the message, or allow the conversation to proceed and the message to be transferred.

Spey is written in Posix-standard C++, using the Sqlite embedded SQL library to store its address database. It should run on most systems, although it has been developed on Linux, and uses very few system resources.

What's New in This Release:
This release supports dropping root privileges after startup for added security, fixes a number of major security holes which could theoretically lead to compromises, and fixes a few other bugs that could leak to occasional crashes.