On Jun 2, 2005, at 1:14 PM, Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC wrote:
On Jun 2, 2005, at 8:49 AM, Kirk Strauser wrote:
On Thursday 02 June 2005 06:54, Bart Silverstrim wrote:
If people keep accepting broken implementation as the status quo,
we're
going to keep getting people who leave broken implementations in
place.
I have to agree with you on that one. Greylisting is no more
non-standard
than saying "I'm kind of having problems right now; please try again
later". If a machine breaks on greylisting, then any number of other
unintentional problems with also break it. On the positive side, so
many
servers are adopting greylisting that I suspect servers that can't
handle
it will get fixed rather quickly.
That is not the issue though. Lots of servers, especially public mail
providers, have tried greylisting and rejected it because their user
base complains that mail is delayed and they want to know that their
mail that their client, support people, etc just sent to them will get
there quickly, not 15 minutes, or 30 minutes, or whatever, later. The
biggest problems with greylisting are not the broken servers who do
not retry -- you can work around them -- it is that the incoming mail
is delayed and users don't like it. Now if you have a mail server
just for yourself or a special userbase this may not apply to you.
And this is why combining greylisting with spamassassin or other
antispam software is appealing -- you only grey list those mails you
have a good suspicion are actually spam. You do not greylist all
mails and so your userbase is happy since their expected email is not
delayed.
According the postgrey's website, it supports automatic whitelisting,
so in theory only a few emails from commonly-transacted email servers
would be delayed. After that their favorite emails will come in
quickly as if they were whitelisted.
In fairness, there are other factors that could delay an email with
the same effect as greylisting.
Our users don't want to take the time to learn anything about managing
their email properly, to do filtering at the MUA level, etc. We still
have users who would run executable attachments from spoofed senders in
their email and wonder why their computer is suddenly acting funny. A
great many users abdicate responsibilities in order to not have to
think...they want their ISP or sysadmins or techies to do the thinking
for them.
This is a question of tradeoffs. The problem with spam and abuse and
malware has gotten to the point where I (and I suspect many others) no
longer have the time or energy to keep chasing ways to make things
better, and educating users can only be just so effective when they
don't want to learn.
It's been a long day, I guess. From what I can tell I'll probably be
implementing postgrey, whether on the current server or on a rebuilt
server, in the very near future. BOFH or not, I'm tired of the
spam/malware hammering us and the jerk spammers that do slip past, and
if the users need to wait a few emails before a site becomes
whitelisted, so be it. If someone's email server is so broken that it
can't handle a request to retry in a short future time, bleh. I don't
want their email and my users can complain to them until they fix their
server. I try to fix problems with my servers when they're brought to
my attention. Other people should try to do so as well, and if you
make it inconvenient for your users to do business with them and
encourage the users to complain to them about the problem or switch to
another service, you'll end up doing a service to other Internet users
in the long run.
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