Ugh.
So my clever hack about RSET apparently triggers problems in feeble, horrible, nasty mail clients like Eudora – which one of my client’s clients actually uses. So I had to back out my change. It was funny to hear someone read me my ‘garbage’ message right back to me, though.
So in the process of poking around, I found that there was already a feature in the qmail chkuser patch which allows you to set a number of bad recipients before which you are over your limit. So I enabled that. And it did not at all stem the flood, because it simply just rejected all subsequent attempts with 400-series messages – not disconnecting the sender.
So once again, I jumped in to the code. And I made it so that it actually disconnects you instead of just marking subsequent connection attempts as automatically-failing.
This seems like it’s working. I have 6500 IP’s in my self-written blacklist, and the smtp server-load has dropped to half. It’s still there, though, so I’ll have to keep an eye on it.
All in all, not a fun day…