On Apr 29, 2007, at 5:00 AM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: Bart Silverstrim [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Saturday, April 28, 2007 5:01 PM
To: Ted Mittelstaedt
Cc: Eric Crist; Grant Peel; Christopher Hilton;
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Greylisting -- Was: Anti Spam
On Apr 28, 2007, at 5:25 AM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: Bart Silverstrim [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Friday, April 27, 2007 1:58 PM
To: Ted Mittelstaedt
Cc: Christopher Hilton; Grant Peel; Eric Crist;
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Greylisting -- Was: Anti Spam
On Apr 26, 2007, at 12:15 AM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
There are legitimate technical reasons that someone may want their
mail
to not be greylisted. For example, my cell phone's e-mail
address is
in our monitoring scripts to page me in the event of a server
failure.
I would be pretty pissed off if Sprint suddenly started
greylisting. It
isn't just dumb-ass users making stupid political decisions to
reject
it, although in your case it probably was.
If it is a legitimate mail server, it would be promoted to the
auto-
whitelist. Not all mail is constantly greylisted by most
intelligent
greylist systems. Only the first few messages would be delayed,
until it is established as legitimate.
That won't work in my case since I generally only have a failure
that causes
a problem which results in paging about once every 3 months or so.
By the
time the pages got through the
greylist it would be at least an hour later after the system had
gone
down. That isn't acceptable for a notification system.
What? What do you mean, a failure that causes a problem which
results in paging once every 3 months?
If your mail server tries to contact another mail server and it can't
reach it, you're saying your mail server doesn't retry for an hour?
If the monitoring system notices something down, I have to know about
it within a few minutes. I cannot wait for the mailserver that
sends the
page out to retry sending the page to the cell carrier's mailserver
in an hour.
Ted, usually I find your posts intelligent and food for thought, but
I almost think you're doing this on purpose now.
When you're setting it up, you would set up manually to have your own
system whitelisted. I would assume that if you really don't own your
own domain/mail system, you still would have a provider that would
whitelist *themselves* so you could send the email from your provider
to yourself. If you're using SMS, I would personally either tell my
phone provider about it or send a few messages myself to have it
whitelist the entry and then periodically test the system, since
really you should be testing such systems periodically anyway (and
make sure the listing is still working).
You said yourself you use greylisting, I thought. Don't you already
have a system like this in place?
Things go down rarely. The moonitoring system is not continually
sending
out pages to my cell phone every day. Many times many months will
pass
in between the monitoring system sending my cell phone a page. If the
cell phone company was running greylisting, any whitelist entry for my
monitoring system would be gone by then.
We rarely lose power to the buildings, but our generator system still
kicks over once a week to test. Why can't you send a page once or
twice a week to make sure it's working properly? Things change,
things get reconfigured or hiccup, and if this is that critical to
you, what's the harm in one or two text messages a month to your
phone saying "howdy?" I mean c'mon...it's so important you must be
notified ASAP, but you can't afford to have it test the connection
periodically is what it sounds like you're saying.
If you're doing something SO critical that
three or four mails delayed an hour, until you're establishes as a
legit user, means life or death, you definitely should be doing
something that backs up how you communicate with other sites,
I'm monitoring systems at the ISP I work at. No, it is not life or
death
if a feed goes down for 3 hours and a bunch of people cannot download
their daily freebsd-questions mailing list fix. At least, I don't
think
so. But they do. And as their money that buys the ISP's product puts
the bread on my table, I have to do what they want.
It's an interesting conundrum that people will bitch about how stupid
their users are yet will turn around and give them "what they want"
to the point where it encourages their bad habits and their reliance
on bad practices and their ignorance. I'm not saying you're doing
this, this is just a general observation.
-Bart
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