David F. Skoll <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> John Leslie wrote:
> 
>> The "fix" Doug and I put into TBR is to extend the time to formal
>> handoff, by any amount the receiving mail system may choose, which
>> accomplishes much of what keeping the TCP connection open would -- at
>> a far smaller cost (the queue of URIs could be written to disk, for
>> one example).
> 
> Except the receiving mail system cannot really choose "any amount",
> because it has no idea for how long the URI will remain valid.

   I'd say it has a far better idea than current graylisting does.
The originator has logs to see whether the URI has been accessed: I
see no reason the originator would take down an unreferenced URI in
less than a few days.

> It can (I suppose) confidently assume it will remain valid for a few
> hours. Maybe even a day.

   I would restate that as "It can confidently assume anything taken
down before being accessed after less than one day is very likely to
have been abusive."

> Any longer is risky.

   I'm hard-pressed to think of a case where you'd need more than 24
hours get "good enough" reputation information.

> So unless you have a formal requirement for how long the URI must
> remain valid, you're still at the mercy of the sender's queueing
> policy (as with greylisting.)

   I suppose we could add a formal requirement: it doesn't seem
necessary to me. I expect originators to keep things available for
at least a week or two in the normal case -- taking down URIs
where the logs show successful access, and possibly expiring some
URIs according to a schedule the user requests.

>> What would others like to see in a fix for graylisting?
> 
> A good greylisting implementation will turn off greylisting once a
> host has been known to retry, and keep it off for that host for some
> fairly long time (like a month or so.)  This greatly reduces the
> annoying impact of greylisting on legitimate MTAs without much
> reducing its effectiveness.

   That's a good implementation practice, though IMHO the period to
keep it off needs to be configurable.

--
John Leslie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

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