[SA-exim] Who's using teergrubing?

[Brian Kendig]

Marc MERLIN wrote:

>> what do you have your teergrube delay set to?  I'm using eight hours
>
> 10mn. I find that most if not all MTAs have code to make sure they 
> don't
> hang around forever. Many don't stay longer than a few minutes, for 
> that
> matter, many spammers don't stay longer than 30 secs

Actually, I'm finding otherwise.  I arbitrarily grabbed my stats for a 
week ago, which happens to be December 27, to have a look at 'em...

On that day, my server identified 119 messages as having a SpamAssassin 
score of 30.0 or above, which is the score I use to start teergrubing 
them.  52 spammers waited patiently for all eight hours of my teergrube 
delay.  33 spammers hung around for between 15 minutes and 8 hours, but 
left before the full delay finished.  The remaining 34 spammers dropped 
before 20 seconds.

I feel happy to have been able to put a dent in the operations of 71% 
of the spammers who dropped by that day.  :)

> Almost all that memory should be shared.

Whups, I forgot about that... thanks for reminding me!

Sometimes I wish I could do more to spammers than simply holding 'em in 
place.  Do mailers typically log all their SMTP traffic?  Would it make 
a difference if, instead of sending a spammer one line of text every 
ten seconds, I sent him the entire contents of /usr/dict/words every 
ten seconds?  Are there any known holes in spamware that my server 
could exploit to cause it to crash?