MavEtJu's Distorted View of the World

BATV and Postgrey

Posted on 2008-05-22 19:00:00, modified on 2008-06-03 19:00:00
Tags: SMTP, Spam, Email

BATV stands for Bounce Address Tag Validation and is a method to prevent backscatter from spam runs. It works by modifying (danger! technical content ahead!) the Envelope From address in an SMTP session from joe@example.com to prvs=tag-value=joe@example.com. If this email is undeliverable, it will be send back to prvs=tag-value=joe@example.com instead of to joe@example.com and your mail host knows that this is a valid undeliverable message.

So what has Postgrey to do with this? Postgrey is a greylisting server. It is (danger! technical content ahead!) forcing email deliveries from addresses and hosts which are not yet known to be retried later. Why? Earlier this century, emails sent by viruses and spam-hosts weren't smart enough to understand this and the email with the malicious payload was not accepted by your mailhost.

Yes, but what has greylisting to do with it? Greylisting delays every email from / email to / sending host combination it hasn't seen before. So if BATV changes the email from address every day, the first email from that user will be delayed every day. Every day! So Postgrey needs to be taught what the real email address is. Luckely BATV keeps this information in the from address: prvs=tag-value=joe@example.com. Small patch, and it works.

And now the tricky stuff: Not every read the documentation properly, and the two following formats have been seen:

prvs=tag-value=joe@example.com prvs=joe=tag-value@example.com
Brilliant! They swapped it around! So my four line patch becomes an eight line patch.

Anyway, the patch is available and submitted to the Postgrey author.

Note: Please note that I've made a little change to the patch to pick the second field (as the standard suggests) instead of the wrong standard. Not that it ever should come to there, but it's a "just in case" thing.

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