October 2022.

1. Plug-in filters.

Sendmail and other Mail Transfer Agents provide ways to 'plug in' a
filter or filters to process mail.  Such filters are called milters.

The things which a milter can do for an MTA are limited mainly by the
imagination of the milter's author.


2. The MTA - milter interface, and languages for writing milters.

An interface is needed between a milter and the MTA which it assists.
Milters can be written in a number of different programming languages;
sometimes mixed languages are used.

The Sendmail::PMilter package provides an interface between the MTA
and milters which may be written in pure Perl.  This package handles
all inter-process communications between the MTA and the milter, it
exposes the information which is provided to the milter by the MTA as
ordinary Perl variables, and it handles the tasks of converting Perl
variables in the milter which contain things like function arguments
and reply codes into a form which the MTA can digest, as well as, in
certain cases, checking for validity.  All this greatly simplifies the
task of writing a milter in Perl.  If milter processing should happen
to produce errors, SIG{__WARN__} and SIG{__DIE__} can be used to catch
(and for example log, or even ignore) the errors, so that the milter
doesn't exit and mail continues to flow,


3. Uses for milters.

A common use of milters is to reject unwanted mail.  Others include

  adding 'boilerplate' text, images, whatever to all messages;
  signing outgoing mail, signature verification for incoming mail;
  encrypting/decrypting mail;
  adding, deleting, inspecting, and/or modifying message headers;
  automatic replies;
  preventing accidental disclosure of confidential information e.g.
      credit card, social security and bank account numbers;
  converting mail text to other formats;
  copying all mail to backup storage;
  rate or size limiting;
  collecting and reporting statistics;
  you can probably think of others.


4. Milter capabilities.

The interface to the running MTA follows the 'Milter Protocol'.  Over
the years the Milter Protocol has progressed through several versions.
It seems now to be well settled at Version 6, which supports more or
less everything anyone might reasonably want to do to a message.

Perl milters have full access to Perl libraries, modules etc. and all
the facilities and utilities made available by the operating system.
Use with caution.


5. Communications between MTA and a milter.

Inter-process communication can be a bit of a minefield.  One of the
aiims of this module is to remove all the complexity.  All you need to
do is to specify the socket which the MTA and a milter will use.  Then
you can get on with the mail filtering itself withouth worrying about
the communication, which is necessary, but secondary to the main task.

A milter process is normally run as a daemon.  It communicates with a
Mail Transfer Agent (and MTA - which is normally another daemon) over
a socket connection.  A single MTA may have more than one milter with
which it exchanges information.  In the Sendmail Milter Protocol, the
MTA sends commands to and receives responses from its milters over a
socket connection.  The details of the socket are configured in both
the configuration of the MTA and in the configurations of the milters
and these must of course agree.  The socket can be a local Unix domain
socket or a TCP socket.  For Sendmail, this is defined by a line in
the configuration file which begins with an 'X'.  Sendmail::PMilter
uses this information to set up the necessary communication between
Perl milters (which "use" it) and the MTA itself.  Because processes
which handle mail are at least time-sensitive even if not necessarily
time-critical, when it hands over to a milter the MTA sets timeouts
and then waits.  If a timeout is reached without an expected response
from the filter, the MTA may decide to ignore the filter and press on.

5.1. Sendmail configuration.

A typical configuration in 'sendmail.cf' might be

O InputMailFilters=x-milter
Xx-milter, S=local:/var/run/x-milter/x-milter.sock, F=T, T=C:10m;S:10m;R:10m;E:20m

This tells Sendmail that there is one milter called 'x-milter'; its
communication will be via a local Unix domain socket; what to do if
the milter fails; and some timeout values.  You may wish to use the M4
processor to create sendmail.cf from 'sendmail.mc', this should do in
the '.mc' file:

INPUT_MAIL_FILTER(`x-milter', `S=local:/var/run/x-milter/x-milter.sock, F=T, T=C:10m;S:10m;R:10m;E:20m')

5.2. Milter configuration.

In the milter itself the socket is configured like this:

$milter_object->setconn('local:/var/run/x-milter/x-milter.sock');

so that the milter and the MTA are on the same page.

5.3. The mechanics of MTA - milter communication.

All messages are passed between the MTA and the milter(s) encoded in
simple 'packets'.  The packets are in fact (and you do not really need
to know this) strings of the very general form "LCS1\0S2\0", where 'L'
is a 32-bit integer (the length of the following data, INCLUDING the
command byte), 'C' is the command byte (a single ASCII character) and
(in this example) S1 and S2 are ASCII text strings each terminated by
ASCII NUL characters (which are of course included when calculating
the length of the packet).

Sendmail::PMilter handles all the packet processing, the milter need
concern itself only with Perl-style scalar variables, arrays etc. and
there's no need to worry about stack bashing, use-after-free, memory
leaks, threads, and those other things that 'C' programmers have to
wrestle with.  This leaves the coder relatively free to concentrate on
the mail processing itself.


6. Mail processing takes place in stages.

Mail processing by milters takes place at several well-defined stages
('connect', 'helo', etc.) during the transmission of the message.  At
each stage the sets of data available ('macros', connected IP address,
sending server's HELO name, sender address etc.) and the permissible
actions (e.g. rewrite a message header, add a header, modify message
parts) are also well-defined and are to some extent configurable.

Filters built to use Sendmail::PMilter can examine any information
made available by the MTA, and can take any of the actions permitted
at any stage of mail processing.  Generally the MTA is looking for a
result (ACCEPT mail, TEMPFAIL, REJECT, DISCARD, CONTINUE processing)
which is returned by the final statement of the milter code for the
current SMTP stage.  For each SMTP stage there is a separate section
of code which is called a 'callback'.  Here it's just a Perl sub, it
differs from the other subs in the milter in that it is 'registered'
with the MTA in a call to Sendmail::PMilter::register() so that the
MTA knows how to call it.

The MTA initiates all communications by a strict sequence of commands
sent from the MTA to the milter via the socket; by default the milter
must reply, but it is possible to negotiate at the beginning of every
connection, for each separate step in the processing if you wish, for
the milter to make no reply to the MTA.

If several milters are used, at each stage of the SMTP conversation
the MTA consults each milter (connect, helo, etc.) in turn, the order
being defined in the MTA configuration file.  If at any stage any one
of the milters replies with REJECT then the message will be rejected,
the remaining steps for this and other milters will not be completed.
If a milter does not wish to be consulted further about a particular
message it can reply with ACCEPT.  If it has reached no conclusion it
can return CONTINUE so that it will be consulted at the next stage of
the conversation (assuming that the MTA does not decide to reject or
tempfail, and the next stage is actually reached).  This is a slight
simplification but it will do for now.


7. Advantages and disadvantages.

Filters can be implemented much more quickly in Perl than for example
in a low-level language like C, and the Perl code does not necessarily
need to be thread-safe.  All mail is essentially text, and Perl is an
extremely powerful tool for text processing.  A milter coded in Perl
can do more or less anything that one reasonably might want to do with
a message.  The milter has full access to all Perl library functions,
standard modules, modules installed from CPAN, many system utilities,
modules of your own, etc. etc.

One of the prices of the power and flexibility of Perl is that the
processes can be large, and processor-intensive; you may need to keep
an eye on that when you're developing.  The current maintainer's all-
singing all-dancing milter generally runs a few 200MByte processes, of
which ~60% is shared, so each process consumes about 80MBytes of RAM.
Typically, processing a short mail message on modest hardware might
consume 50ms-500ms of CPU time; an accepted message which is examined
at every Protocol stage will likely cost significantly more than one
that is disposed of (ACCEPT, REJECT, TEMPFAIL, DISCARD) early in the
Milter Protocol.  Timings are heavily dependent on the configuration,
the code, and the hardware of course.

8. Complexity is an enemy of security.

Enough said.


9. Sendmail::Milter (Obsolete)
==============================

Ancient and very flawed module which has been unmaintained since the
end of the 20th century but which Sendmail::PMilter originally used.
Sendmail::Milter supported only Version 2 of the Milter Protocol, has
a poor reputation with its users, and its author has been unhelpful.
In view of the shortcomings its use cannot be recommended; versions of
Sendmail::PMilter later than 1.2x do not use it.
