Some questions about milter-graylist, its errors and how it interacts with other services

Hello everybody,

recently I checked my mail.log and for every mail processed I have two errors there:

milter-greylist: smfi_getsymval failed for {if_addr}

and

milter-greylist: smfi_getsymval failed for {i}

I’m sure this is quite new and I guess it came up when I set a mail limit for a certain domain (100 mails per minute).

Now to my questions:

  1. Can I do something against these errors? (I really don’t like errors in my logs :stuck_out_tongue: )

  2. If not are they really safe to ignore like some other threads would suggest, if yes what exactly do they mean?

  3. I have my mail setup configured so that SPF and DKIM is checked as well, does the milter greylist interact/interfere with with this in any way or can I assume DKIM and SPF checking still works like it should? (I ask because errors make me worry that maybe there are some cases were mail relaying would fail which really wouldn’t be good.)

  4. If milter greylist is only used for mail rate limiting like stated in another thread, can I disable it (and thus hopefully get rid of the errors) and is there maybe an alternative way to limit mail rates?

Thanks a lot for clearing this up!

  1. Not that I know of. I don’t really like errors in my log either, but I learned to ignore them. :slight_smile:

  2. Yes, as far as I know they are safe to ignore. I saw no negative effects, and I have them in my log as well since I turned on the milter.

  3. Hmm, I don’t really understand that question. :slight_smile: You must have manually enabled the mail rate limiting (and thus the milter) in the first place, otherwise you wouldn’t be getting the messages, so if you don’t want mail rate limiting, you can just disable it again and the milter will be turned off. There’s no alternative built into Virtualmin at this point though.

Thanks for your answers! Now I at least feel a bit better ignoring these errors :wink:

There's no alternative built into Virtualmin at this point though. And that's kind of the answer I was looking for. But since I only enabled and need mail rate limiting for one domain I wouldn't mind to achieve it with any other technique even if it's not a Virtualmin feature and even if it wouldn't be as comfortable as the current Virtualmin built in feature... googeling brought me to policyd which I guess can be used as an alternative, however I'm not yet sure if its possible to configure it so that it limits domain based (and not only cllient/IP based). I thought maybe someone already did something similar and maybe could provide some hints. However when I have some more time I'll look into it and post an update, too.

Howdy,

And regarding question #3 – SPF and DKIM are handled separately. Using milter-greylist won’t interfere with those.

-Eric