Policy Implementation

Many policies in slimta will be applied directly before queuing the message. These are called queue policies, and they are especially useful because they are executed once for every message and the results are persistently stored. Spam filtering is an example of a great queue policy, because it is expensive and the results can be stored in the Envelope object as an attribute or header.

Other policies in slimta will be applied directly before each delivery attempt, called relay policies. A great example of a relay policy would be recipient forwarding looked up from a database; you would want to make sure the latest forwarding rules are applied on each delivery attempt, to not use a stale rule. At the moment, no relay policies are included with slimta.

Date Header

Addition of a Date: header is a necessary policy for most MTAs, when the original message lacks one. The header generally uses local time-zones written as acronyms, for better human-readability.

The Date: header addition is a queue policy, given by the AddDateHeader class:

from slimta.policy.headers import AddDateHeader
queue.add_policy(AddDateHeader())

Message-Id Header

A Message-Id: header should be added by the first MTA receiving the message from the client, if not by the client itself. The header should not be overridden by any subsequent MTA handling the message. A Message-Id will look similar to an email address: left- and right-parts separated by an @ with the whole thing surrounded by < and >. The right-part of the ID is usually the FQDN of the MTA that first received the message. The left-part should be a string that tries to uniquely identify the message from all the other messages the MTA has or will handle. This uniqueness is usually attained by concatenating a randomly-generated UUID to a timestamp.

The Message-Id: header addition is a queue policy, given by the AddMessageIdHeader class:

from slimta.policy.headers import AddMessageIdHeader
queue.add_policy(AddMessageIdHeader())

Received Header

The Received: header is the most unique and complicated header of those that MTAs should add to a message. The header should be pre-pended to every message, so that the order that each MTA handled the message is preserved. The header does not have a strict, RFC-mandated format, but cr.yp.to has a good recommendation that fits what most good MTAs will do, and slimta attempts to follow.

The Received: header addition is a queue policy, given by the AddReceivedHeader class:

from slimta.policy.headers import AddReceivedHeader
queue.add_policy(AddReceivedHeader())

Recipient Forwarding

Forwarding policies range from quite simple to exorbitantly complex. The Forward policy included with slimta can only handle static rules (e.g. not queried from a database) using regular expression-based substitution.

Because the mappings are static and thus will never become stale like a database lookup might, this is implemented as a queue policy, given by the Forward class:

from slimta.policy.forward import Forward

fwd = Forward()
fwd.add_mapping(r'(ian|icg)@example.com', 'admin@example.com')
queue.add_policy(fwd)

SpamAssassin

The included spam filtering mechanism uses SpamAssassin by making a socket connection to a spamd server. When used as a policy, the message is scanned and a X-Spam-Status: header is added to the message with either "YES" or "NO" indicating spamminess. If spammy, another header X-Spam-Symbols: is also added with the symbols used in the match.

SpamAssassin is an expensive operation, so it is implemented as a queue policy, given by the SpamAssassin class:

from slimta.policy.spamassassin import SpamAssassin
queue.add_policy(SpamAssassin())