On Thu, 2008-03-27 at 00:58 +1030, Tim wrote: > On Wed, 2008-03-26 at 06:35 -0700, Craig White wrote: > > Greylisting has been a very effective tool for me and I have had NO > > complaints about it at all. > > The problem with thought process is thus: Admin says, "We don't get any > complaints." And the reason for that is that outsiders are unable to > make any contact to lay a complaint. It happens all the time, and > admins are unable to get their head around the issue... ---- again... 3 years, 7 servers tells me that this is not only eminently workable but an important tool. YMMV - I'm comfortable with that. ---- > > > There's actually a way around it in a crunch...I've put a 5 minute > > window. > > That's really not a solution. While your server may say, come back in > 5, you don't have any control over how, when, or if, the sender will > actually retry. And neither do us have any control over how our ISPs > configure their SMTP servers that we're forced to post through. > > As soon as you implement greylisting, you *WILL* make it completely > impossible for *some* people to email you. It's an inescapable fact. > Trying to guess how much you will lose, and the worth of that loss, is a > pointless exercise. > > It's not good for business, nor even personal relations. Some people > will try to contact you via an alternative method, some will not. I am > one of those who puts little effort into contacting someone that makes > it hard to do so, and I am not alone in that regard. ---- You speak in absolutes but your absolutes choose a window that is incomplete. It's bad for business to have a server tied up in trying to run clamav and spamassassin scan a batch of e-mails that 70% would never reach the queue if you run greylisting. We are not talking about an insignificant number of computer cycles at all. As for making it impossible for *some* people to e-mail accounts on these servers...I haven't had a single report to that effect, again, 3 years, 7 mail servers. ---- > A case in point, the greylisting response that killed a message I tried > sending to someone, to whom I had no other way to get in touch with: > > This message was created automatically by mail delivery software. > A message that you sent has not yet been delivered to one or more of its > recipients after more than 24 hours on the queue ...[snip]... > > The message identifier is: ...[snip]... > The subject of the message is: ...[snip]... > The date of the message is: Sun, 10 Feb 2008 21:49:26 +1030 > > The address to which the message has not yet been delivered is: > > ...[snip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]... > Delay reason: SMTP error from remote mail server after RCPT TO:...[snip]...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>: > host secmx.vic.chariot.net.au [203.87.83.188]: > 450 4.7.1 <...[snip]...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>: Recipient address rejected: > Greylisted for 1 minutes > > The message said to try again in 1 minute, it never succeeded. The > error message, about it, came to me two days later. I saw no point in > trying to send again, the system had tried to resend and failed, by > itself. There's nothing I can do to change how it was going to try. > > Taking a day to try and e-mail someone, and being informed two whole > days after posting that it failed, is just pathetic. Email should take > mere seconds, no matter what some dingbats think about it. ---- you are throwing out the baby with the bath water. Just because some system out there is configured poorly doesn't mean that the underlying technology isn't sound. Craig
