[elspy] usual questions about suitability

[Eric S. Johansson]

I apologize if this seems terribly interrogatory but I have been burned 
a couple of times by projects in this space and I really am hoping to 
find a good filter interface to work with.

I'm the primary author of the camram anti-spam system.  I will spare you 
the sales pitch but if you want to learn more, take a look at 
www.camram.org.

unlike most anti-spam filters however, I need somewhat different filter 
interface characteristics.  Specifically, i.e. need:

the ability to rewrite recipients both in terms of number of and modify 
their e-mail addresses[1].  This also includes the ability to declare a 
message as having vanished from the MTA's awareness (in other words, 
it's been consumed by the anti-spam filter).

the ability to limit the number of filter instances running at any one 
time.  There are many things that camram does that works relatively well 
in a multitasking environment but there are a few things that just 
consume every ounce of CPU you have and then some for a few moments. 
Those operations really want to be single threaded.

the ability to distinguish which interface the traffic comes from or the 
ability to bind filter to interface.

I have a concern about the life/support/viability of the filter 
interface because it's really painful putting in a lot of work to use a 
filter interface only to have the filter interface become unsupported 
for goodness knows what reason.  I've acquired this little bit of scar 
tissue one time too many.  ;-)

since there are two python interfaces to exim, it would be nice to know 
if either one of them was "officially" supported by the exim community.

thank you for your patience and answering any of these questions.  I 
will admit I am *so* looking forward to learning yet another MTA filter 
interface in a hurry as well as the MTA itself.  ;-)

---eric


[1] modifying the e-mail address might actually be something that can 
handle in exim rewrite rules further up.  I've got one site where the 
addresses get rewritten to an intermediate form which I then need to 
eliminate before I use and forward.  I suspect they won't be the last.
-- 
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