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Nullmailer can waste massive ammounts of bandwidth and is IMO unfit for release.



I just ran into a particularlly nasty instance of bug 329192

As described in that bug nullmailer ignores permanent errors, has an agressive retry policy and never times out messages stuck in the queue.

If a message that is too large for the smarthost to accept gets into the queue this can waste MASSIVE ammounts of bandwidth to the extent that I would expect mailserver admins to consider it network abuse. I just had multiple instances of nullmailer get stuck in this state and between them they were chewing up 20 megabits per second of bandwidth. Fortunately in this case I was the mailserver admin and the traffic was only running over a local vlan so there were no repercussions other than my time tracking down where the traffic was coming from but in other circumstances this could be far more serious either wasting large ammounts of paid bandwith, causing users to get banned from accessing their smarthost or both.


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