[geeks] Greylisting?

[Mike Meredith]

On Tue, 22 Nov 2005 09:48:16 -0600, Michael Parson wrote:
> Does this abuse other people's mail servers?  

Yes. Does the level of abuse matter when it's just one personal domain
with a low volume of mail ? No. Does it matter if greylisting becomes
widespread on personal low volume mail domain ? Probably not that much.
Does it matter if it becomes a widespread practice amongst mail server
administrators ? Yes it certainly would.

Mail servers are at their most efficient when they can hand off mail to
the destination server immediately. Waiting for the next queue run is
far less efficient and can cause problems if you have a significantly
increased proportion of mail destinations using greylisting. Just ask on
a mailing list with large mail server administrators on whether
greylisting is responsible behaviour (but don't because it causes a
flame war).

As the administrator of a mail server you should be minimising the
negative impact on the Internet of your service. Greylisting increases
it.

I'm not totally against greylisting (as detailed previously) but
restricting it to dubious connecting hosts seems to be a better choice
than doing it to everyone.

And on my own medium volume (100k messages a day) server I'm blocking
98% of spam without greylisting.