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On Friday, May 18 at 10:47 AM, quoth Darrin Chandler:
> Spammers will not adapt to greylisting until they absolutely must.
Mmmm, not true. I already get spam from all manner of people whom I
did business with once and now can't convince not to send me email
(that'll teach me to buy discount DVD's from someone other than
Amazon!). As they have a "business", but can't be convinced to take me
off of their mailing list, they will use their fully functional email
server to send me spam.
Plus, there's always open-relays and (my personal favorite) forwarding
addresses. Any spam sent to any of the addresses (e.g. the one my
undergraduate school gave me) that I have forwarding to my real
address will have the full SMTP-compliance of that institution behind
it.
The only spammers that greylisting blocks are the ones that use
botnets. Which, don't get me wrong, is a lot! But they aren't the
entire class of spammers.
Besides that, spammers are always in the market for finding better and
better ways to get mail to people. Given that it costs them zero
dollars to maintain a million-computer botnet, why on earth would they
care at all if they had to install a queueing mail server on them?
> Greylisting makes them behave like a real mail servers, which cuts
> down the send rate, which makes it less profitable and more
> difficult. Even if they all adapt, the economics have still changed.
> Reducing their margin is a good thing. :)
It only cuts down their send rate for:
1) The first email, and
2) The people who use greylisting (read: not everyone)
The sooner they start using spam-senders that can retry, the sooner
greylisting will become ineffective, and the fewer people will ever
try greylisting, and the less cost they pay in terms of slowdown.
But again, the economics argument seems to me to be a specious one.
Spammers have essentially infinite resources: a giant botnet costs
them virtually nothing to create and maintain. They do not pay for any
of the resources they use (electricity, bandwidth, time, etc.), so
making them use more resources doesn't affect their margin. Even if it
did cost them money (let's say they're paying someone to maintain the
botnet at a certain size), they make money based on a VERY low
response rate. If it's economical for them to send mail to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (which they do *all* *the* *time*), then
it's hard to believe it wouldn't be economical to queue the spam (for
free, on someone else's computer) and try again a few minutes later.
I understand and appreciate your argument, but I just don't believe
spammers are terribly worried about greylisting.
~Kyle
- --
If you are going through hell, keep going.
-- Winston Churchill
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