Re: Pharamcudical list of words in a table

[ha...@t-online.de]

>> 
>> --On Tuesday, September 06, 2005 12:38 AM -0700 List Mail User 
>> <tr...@Plectere.com> wrote:
>> 
>> > 	You have the unfortunate luck of being on the cutting edge
>> > of the spam runs, most of these domains are now in 4 or 5 SURBL
>> > lists, which will give you scores of close to 12 alone.
>> 
>> Greylisting would help here. If you greylist an unknown source long enough, 
>> and it gets into SURBL during the delay, you'll get the SURBL score boost 
>> when (if) the retry is attempted.
>> 
>> Alas, commercial recipients can't use greylisting as effectively because 
>> they expect to accept legitimate mail from a lot more unknown senders.
>> 
>> And greylisting during a disaster like Katrina could block mail from 
>> friends using unusual modes of sending (like an Internet cafe terminal).
>> 
I know the problem with commercial recipients but I dont fully understand it (running a mailserver
for clients that dont like greylist, myself)
Basically a short greylist hold time (few minutes) is sufficient to block spam from machines
sending directly to your server. The internet cafe is supposed to send via an upstream
mail relay or run their own mailserver, so the message would get through within minutes.
The one thing that is stopped by greylisting is the ability to ask a new contact on the phone
to mail some material, and then discuss it right away (and in real life mail delivery often
is not that instantaneous, anyway)

Wolfgang Hamann

Re: Pharamcudical list of words in a table

[Loren Wilton <lw...@earthlink.net>]

> I know the problem with commercial recipients but I dont fully understand
it (running a mailserver
> for clients that dont like greylist, myself)

There are essentially two problems here that bother commercial email
traffic.

1.    As you noted, some people like to use email as instant messaging,
quite legitimately.  Greylisting can interfere with this, especially if you
have a setup that isn't good at recognizing prior legit mail from the same
source.  (And even if it is working proplerly.)

2.    It is an unfortunate fact of life that there are some unknown number
of mail programs out there that will for one reason or other effectively
treat or turn a tempfail into a permanent fail.  In this case the mail is
lost, which is not good for business.  There are some unknown other number
of programs that might only reply back after 24 hours or 3 days or some
such.  Also not good for business.

Now, how 'real' is the second problem?  Certianly if you google around you
find documented lists of programs that fail to respond correctly, and some
of these are known or strongly suspected to still be in use at various
companies.  Maybe in reality this isn't a problem.  But nobody is willinbg
to take the chance yet.

On the first problem, I've had any number of tech support sessions where the
only way the guy could contact me while debugging the problem with live
equipment was over email.  So I'd ask him to check something, then get an
email reply back, then respond, etc.  Often these sessions started from
someplace I had never received mail from before, and it could come from most
anyplace in the world, usually unrelated to where the person was physically
located.  Greylisting would have been bad news on at least the initial help
request.

        Loren