Bryan Kadzban wrote: > Yeah, but how hard would it be to add retrying to a spammer's botnet > software? I'm going to predict that within the next year, if > greylisting is implemented widely (and I've been hearing about it a lot, > but I don't know how many servers actually do it), the spammers will > just start retrying once if they get a temporary-error response.
They may eventually work out something that gets past the greylisting. It's entirely conceivable. The big advantage is that greylisting works in harmony with some of the more traditional spam blocking measures. Blacklisting services keep the spammers on their toes, so to speak. They have to keep changing their IP in order to get around the blacklists. Greylisting takes advantage of that and forces them to stay with one IP if they want to get through. But, if they do that, they'll get blacklisted. It's a very complementary setup. I did not mean to imply that there was really any major cause for worry with the new setup. It is working very well, and by far, valid MTAs will retry after a temporary failure. Even without greylisting and just using the methods we had in place before, there was a possibility that valid mail wouldn't get through. That has always existed. Giving my personal address was simply to allow another means for someone to get a hold of me. Of course, anyone can always send mail to postmaster AT l14h DOT org which is really the proper way. Anyway, the fact that we are having this conversation and that mailman is processing fewer junk emails shows that it is working as we hoped. -- JH -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
