Am Montag, den 18.07.2005, 18:23 +0200 schrieb Eric Thomas:
[...]
> I don't know why you think the spam exit is "horrible." It has to work with
> any spam filter and the only reasonable way to pass the message to an
> unknown third-party spam filter is through a file. This is not very
> efficient, but then it is maybe 0.1% of the total processing time if you use
> SpamAssassin, which is what most people use...
There are two major problems with the spamfilter-implementation, as it
is currently done by listserv.

Of course using a file to pass a message to a spam-filter is no problem
as such. I couldn't do it any better. However, the way you do it you can
only scan one message at any given time, and that is what I consider to
be a problem. On http://www.lsoft.com/news/techtiplsv-issue2-2005-us.asp
you say that it can take up to 10 seconds to scan a single message.
Usually you wouldn't even have a load-problem if you tried to scan
several messages at once, since there can be long timeouts for
dns-queries etc. where the spam-filter is basically idle.
With your setup, you can't and you suffer the full delay. If you'd give
a path as option to the invocation of the filter, you could give every
running spam-filter-instance a dedicated directory, thus enabling
parallelization.
However, if you only have low-traffic, that's no necessarily a problem.

The second problem: there is no per-list-configuration-interface of the
spam-filter. You can accept or you can deny globally, nothing more.
That's quite unusable in my environment, my listowners demand to have
more choise. Some want no filter at all, some want Spam to be denied,
some want to enforce moderation of suspected Spam for otherwise public
mailinglists.

I can provide that level of service easily, since in my setup
SpamAssassin tags each e-mail before it is passed to listserv. The
per-list Content-Filter-template is then used to provide list-based
Spam-protection. Very easy and lots of satisfied customers. :-)

Since I provide my own spam-filter-setup instead of Listserv's
capabilites, I can provide higher performance and better service.

--
CU,
   Patrick.