[geeks] Greylisting?

[Sebastian Jaenicke]

Hi,

On Tue, Nov 22, 2005 at 02:03:49AM -0600, Bill Bradford wrote:
> Anybody here using greylisting to stop/slow spam?  Thoughts on it?
>
> My initial reaction was "that's just WRONG and bad and liable to lose
> mail".. but tons of people seem to be using it.

'Tons of people' using something doesn't mean is must be good ;)

I've seen this discussion many times and would have preferred
not commenting on it again, but with all those pro-greylisting
replies, I just cannot resist.

While greylisting doesn't violate the SMTP protocol, it still
(ab)uses some of its features in a way they weren't supposed
to be used. First of all, it slows down reception of valid
(i.e. non-spam) messages. Furthermore, it abuses other mail
servers resources (queue space, cpu time, ..) where it wouldn't
be necessary in the first place - after all, it's a valid message,
it's addressed to _you_, so why refuse it?

If it's spam, that's _your_ (i.e. the recipients) problem, and it's
in the responsibility of your mail server to deal with that instead
of imposing additional resource consumption on other people's
servers.

Yes, greylisting helps to reduce the amount of spam messages
received by your mail server, but with all those side effects,
I wouldn't consider using it.

- Sebastian

--
Progress (n.): The process through which Usenet has evolved from
smart people in front of dumb terminals to dumb people in front
of smart terminals.
              -- obs at burnout.demon.co.uk

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