Re: blacklist.cf needs to die (was Re: Help figuring our why SA is taking like 1.5 minutes to filter...)

[Justin Mason <jm...@jmason.org>]

Matt Kettler writes:
> Justin Mason wrote:
> > OK, we really need to figure out some way to kill these FAQs off. Every
> > week, someone asks a question about why SpamAssassin is killing their
> > server, and most of the time the answer is "stop using blacklist.cf and
> > blacklist-uri.cf".  If 1 person is asking the question, chances are
> > there's another 10 people who aren't asking, and who are just ditching
> > SpamAssassin entirely. :(
> >
> >
> > RDJ folks -- can you zero out, or remove, those two files from the list
> > entirely?  It doesn't seem to matter if we say "don't use them" on
> > our websites, people will set up RDJ to download everything anyway
> > it seems.
> >   
> That will help a little. However, a lot of folks using RDJ are using
> really old versions. Remember how many folks started posting to the list
> after I modified antidrug.cf to generate errors? This happened long
> after I got them to modify RDJ to not include it.
> 
> There also seem to be a some sites out there that have copies of RDJ
> which aren't recent. For example, Fortress Systems (fsl.com, commercial
> MailScanner) still has an old copy on their "resources" site that still
> supports antidrug,cf and if enabled will to download antidrug.cf from
> comcast. (The updated version lives on sandgnat.com) They're default
> config doesn't have it in the trusted rulesets, but they really
> shouldn't have support for it in their script at all anymore.
> 
> (In other news, I finally canceled the comcast account on Tuesday. So
> that one is now completely out of my control. Fortress Systems, are you
> listening? I'll try posting on the MailScanner list later..)
> 
> > I think I'll add a new question right on the top of the FAQ list
> > about this...
> >
> > What else can we do?
> >   
> Add code to generate a lint warning any time a .cf file over 1mb is read
> unless a config option is set to silence it?
> 
> Possibly even have this as as:
> warn_conffile_maxsize  (speced in KB, default 1024)
> 
> Users that want to use absurdly large files can just raise the number..
> 
> We could do the same with a warning based on rule count, and/or
> white/blacklist entries.
> 
> Of course, we might need to do a little research as to what's
> reasonable, but certainly the numbers in the blacklist files are a good
> example of what's not reasonable..

+1, this is a good idea.  Any one .cf file should not be that large.

--j.