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Milter (portmanteau for ''mail filter'') is an extension to the widely used open source mail transfer agents (MTA) Sendmail and Postfix. It allows administrators to add mail filters for filtering spam or viruses in the mail-processing chain. In the language of the art, "milter" refers to the protocol and API implementing the service, while "a milter" has come to refer to a filter application that uses milter to provide service. ==History== Prior to the advent of milter, an email filter was generally implemented as a program to which an MTA would hand the message once it has completely arrived, with most of the message's envelope information removed. That program could then analyze the header and body of the message and make a decision to accept the message (i.e. return a "success" status to the MTA) or reject it (i.e. return a "failed" status to the MTA). The MTA would then log a successful delivery or return a failure message to the sender as appropriate, and the filter would be responsible for effecting delivery of the message (to the intended inbox(es) as-is, or modified to remove unwanted content, or to specific folder(s), etc.). An MTA that is milter-capable instead notifies filters to which it is connected about each phase of the delivery of a message, from initial client connection through completion of transmission. At each phase of the SMTP session, the filter is given data about the arriving message and then has an opportunity to terminate acceptance of the message early when appropriate. For very large messages, this can have an enormous impact when a decision to reject can be made as early as possible. Moreover, unlike the former model, a milter-capable MTA can connect to multiple filters in parallel that serve specific purposes such as anti-virus, anti-spam, message authentication, flow regulation, etc. Finally, such filters can take special action on the message: add or remove recipients in the envelope; alter the body prior to delivery; add, change or remove header fields in the message, etc. The Sendmail Consortium includes a special thread-based library in the sendmail distribution that provides the milter API. The use of milters has spread in recent years and milters are becoming increasingly important in mail processing on the large scale to block, verify and sort incoming mail. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Milter」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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