greetdelay

What is it?

greetdelay is a program to introduce a small delay before an SMTP greeting. It can also optionally enforce RFC 2821's recommendation that SMTP clients not send any commands before receiving the greeting message.

How to install `greetdelay`

Download the latest version of greetdelay, greetdelay-0.03.tar.gz.

Unpack the greetdelay package:

    tar -zxf greetdelay-0.03.tar.gz
    cd greetdelay-0.03

Compile greetdelay:
```
    make
```
Install greetdelay (you should adjust these commands to suit your operating system; e.g., some systems want greetdelay.1 in /usr/local/share/man/man1/, and don't care about greetdelay.0):
```
    cp greetdelay /usr/local/bin/
    cp greetdelay.0 /usr/local/man/cat1/
    cp greetdelay.1 /usr/local/man/man1/
```

Upgrading from previous versions of `greetdelay`

0.02 to 0.03

Setting GREETDELAY to "" now has the same effect as not setting it. A 554 response is given if greetdelay shuts down the SMTP session.

0.01 to 0.02

Status messages and error messages now include IP address and process ID.

Similar packages

smtp-delay and qmail-banner are two other SMTP greeting delay programs in the style of greetdelay.

A patch that adds GREETDELAY support to qmail-smtpd is available at http://www.fehcom.de/qmail/qmail.html.

Known issues

Exim's default timeout for address verification callout is only 30 seconds.

Ebay's mail servers don't wait for an SMTP greeting banner at all.

Matthew R. Dempsky <mrd@alkemio.org>