[H-GEN] People's thoughts on Greylisting

[Anthony Towns]

On Sat, Nov 26, 2005 at 06:37:12AM +1000, Greg Black wrote:
> > Have people used it or encountered it?  What are your thoughts on the 
> > method or implementations that you have seen ?

It's great:
  http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/blog/2004/09/09#2004-09-09-greylisting

>   1. Some large ISPs use a rotating pool of servers to handle
>      outgoing email, 

This seems to get fixed effectively just by matching the /24 that sends
the mail, IME.

Forwarding addresses (like the humbug.org.au MX forwarding spam to
aj at humbug.org.au to me) can be a problem -- first, greylisting on
the final destination won't help because there's a real MTA that will
forward the spam on to you; and second, you'll be uselessly loading that
MTA. In some cases that can overload the MTA severely and you'll lose
mail. Arguably that means the MTA can't cope with it's load, but *shrug*.

> So, although I know plenty of people are happy with greylisting,
> I'm not going to try it; the problems with it seem like too high
> a price to pay for what would be, at most, a limited return.

Yup. The more people that do that, the less effort spammers will spend
on defeating greylisting... :)

Cheers,
aj
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