[Greylist-users] GroupWise is the Devil

[Evan Harris]

> Ok, I think I understand the problem and see a reasonable solution.
>
> The "bug" is that Groupware continues on to the DATA stage,
> even after failing in the RCPT TO stage.
> Note that even if this bug is fixed, there will still be a lot
> of broken mailers for a long time.
> (I'll bet it also doesn't properly handle things correctly when
> one of three RCPTs fail, but that's hardly a greylisting problem)
>
> The solution is to fail the DATA with a 4xx /as well/ if there
> was at least one RCPT that was 4xx.

Actually, that's not the case.

What it appears is that Groupwise is considering any error other than a 2xx
"success" after the RCPT phase as a permanent error.  It sees the 4xx as an
permanent failure meaning an invalid user and then returns a bounce claiming
that there were no valid recipients.  The bounce is generated by (very
broken) groupwise, not by the mailer it was delivering to, as it appears.

Groupwise is just very broken.

But, the good news is that if users of the example milter for sendmail
consider groupwise a likely problem, and don't wish to manually whitelist
any groupwise servers, then you can simply set the config variable
$tempfail_messages_after_data_phase = 1 to work around the issue.

And for users of mail servers other than sendmail, most (all?) of them can't
issue the failure until after the data phase anyway, so the issue is moot
for them.

Personally, I hope many people will complain to Novell and file bug reports
against Groupwise so they fix it and issue a notice to customers.  To that
end, I'll be leaving it so that Groupwise fails so that users will report it
and I can just notify the Groupwise sysadmins so they can file their own
bugreport.  If a couple of very large Groupwise installs file bugs, they
should issue a fix quickly, one would hope.

Evan