Comment 1 for bug 1839487

It is used in production, but not as far as I know with the sysv init script. Patches welcome for improving the sysv init as I don't have a good way to test it.

There is a bug here, but not what you'd expect. The line before that:

Milter.runmilter(miltername, socketname, 240)

starts the milter, so it's running, waiting for input via the milter protocol. The 'started' message is actually pointless.

It's not designed to background itselt, but to have the init system do it, so the fact that it remains in foreground is expected. For testing, it works just fine that way. You can configure your sendmail or postfix to talk to it and see if it works. If it does, then it's almost certainly an init script issue and I'd be glad to update that if you have specific feedback.