On Thu, 2004-12-09 at 18:33, James Wilkinson wrote: > > Ain't that the truth. When greylisting becomes sufficiently popular, > spammers are going to start using software that retries properly. Actually I am doubtful that the spammers will do anything differently. They get paid to send millions of messages, as long as they say they pushed so many millions of messages they get paid. The fact that most of those get blocked and dropped is not going to make much difference to them. As long as they get paid for dumping messages they will not change because if they start checking for error codes and queue and resend messages it will slow down them sending messages. It will also consume a lot more resources on the systems being used which increases the chance the owners of the systems will detect it or reduce the number of systems that can run the software. The additional code will increase the payload size that the virus will have to deliver as well which hopefully will make that job a little harder. And if/when they do start deploying software that gets around greylisting we just extend the delay a little bit and use an RBL to check on the sending machine after the delay expires. Most likely they will have hit a spam collection system and been added to the RBL so your system rejects the message. But I expect greylisting will remain very effective for the next several years at least. -- Scot L. Harris webid@xxxxxxxxxx If you don't drink it, someone else will.
