On Thu, 2009-06-18 at 13:23 -0400, Terry Carmen wrote: > > Even if I was a local customer, the concept of "email only works when the > lights are on" would make me look somewhere else. That is your prerogative and I respect that. It depends on what your core business is and how desperate you are I guess.
> Especially when accompanied > by a message that indicates that your mail server is actually running and > available, but has been configured to not accept mail because your front door > is locked. I would tend to use a company myself who told me that they valued their staff who start work at 8am and would be available from that time to help. Not that I would have to wait until 9 or 10 am whilst they sorted the previous nights email before they could deal with my request. > > In the end, you can do what you want, but I think you're using an > inappropriate and not very effective method to control spam. It's not just about assisting with spam. There is a much bigger picture going on. How about blocking port 25 at the gateway and shutting the server down to save power overnight. You put a signature in your emails similar to "To save energy and help look after the environment our company powers down unnecessary electrical equipment overnight. This includes our email server as there are no members of the team here to respond to messages. Email sent to us after 8pm through to 8am will not reach us. Now please print this out on paper from a non sustainable forest and pin hand it out to everybody...." > The spammers > don't generally care what time it is, since bandwidth and hardware cost them > almost nothing. But they cost me, and each message in may only be a few K, but count as 'downloaded' in terms of bandwidth - and that is something I pay for. > > If you want greylisting, why not use appropriate software and a reasonable > delay? I don't. I want to shut off email out of hours. I can block spam easily. I want to stop all communication to spare the need when I'm not available. That said, the IP tables idea is much better. Thanks Terry, I'll steal that one and see what difference it makes in terms of used electricity.
