public blacklists

[James Wilkinson]

Ed Wilts wrote:
> A coworker turned on greylisting on his home system last night and
> discovered that a message from the mrtg mailing list was initially
> blocked but not retried.  In other words, a legitimate message that
> should have been delivered went to the bit bucket.  You can make a
> perfectly valid case that the server that tried to deliver it is broken,
> but you can also make a perfectly valid case that you're now preventing
> legitimate e-mail from being delivered.

Um. With a set-up like that, mail loss is inevitable anyway. Sometimes
(not always) it's better to have a situation where you know there's a
problem and can take steps to fix it properly (on the sending server, in
this case), rather than a situation that apparently works properly but
doesn't.

Because evidently, no-one's spotted that some mail is getting lost and
kicked up enough of a fuss.

> In a large
> corporate environment, it's too late to add a server to a whitelist -
> you may have already lost an order, frustrated a customer, or at least
> added maintenance work for your e-mail admins.

In this case, unfortunately, getting everyone who's going to e-mail you
to install and configure their mail servers properly is impossible.
(Insert cynical statement about certain so-called "mail servers"
here...)

> There is no single free one-step method for stopping all spam and
> nothing but the spam.

Ain't that the truth. When greylisting becomes sufficiently popular,
spammers are going to start using software that retries properly.

James.

-- 
E-mail address: james | "What kind of music do you get here, ma'am?"
@westexe.demon.co.uk  | "Why, we get both kinds of music, Country and
                      | Western."