More thoughts on policy stuff

From: Murray S. Kucherawy <msk_at_cloudmark.com>
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:11:34 -0700

Just to keep some momentum going even though I'm buried at work this week due to duty rotation...

I think right now I'm partial to the idea of doing policy control within the process rather than accessing a policy engine external to the filter. The downside to this, as stated, is that the best current option is LUA whose syntax is unfamiliar to most (including me at this point). We could also write our own scripting language and use yacc/bison to process it, possibly producing something that is more intuitive than what LUA offers, although I'm not certain it would be possible to do complex logic that way. The upsides are mostly operational: an external process could hang, be very slow or even be unavailable, and the filter has to be sensitive to milter timeouts on the other side lest the MTA start having to fall back to failure conditions and interfere with mail delivery. Frankly that stuff makes the in-process solution more palatable to me even though we'd face the new syntax problem Mike mentioned.

I'm hoping to take an experimental run at LUA and some of the open SourceForge issues starting next week just to see how difficult it would be, unless someone else would like to do so and report findings.
Received on Thu Oct 15 2009 - 19:11:44 PST