Slightly OT: Greylisting success or failure stories?

David Hoffman dhoffman2004 at gmail.com
Thu Feb 3 21:28:48 UTC 2005


On Thu, 03 Feb 2005 16:09:07 -0500,
replies-lists-redhat at listmail.innovate.net
<replies-lists-redhat at listmail.innovate.net> wrote:
> as someone who has had responsibility for large, time-sensitive,
> mailings, i think that greylisting is bad. it pushes a high resource
> cost back on the (legit) sender. while it may reduce the amount of spam
> you get, it basically doesn't change the spammer's costs. also, since
> they are dealing with percentages, that the one message to you doesn't
> get delivered does little in terms of their effectiveness.
>
> i have found that using dnsbl to block acceptance from dynamic
> ipaddress assignments and open relays, along with a well-tuned
> spamassassin implementation basically rids my mailboxes of spam. in the
> end i get max 1 untagged spam delivered to my mailbox per day -- for an
> e-mail address that has been in public use for about 10 years.
>

Thank you --- whoever you are (unnamed account), for your comments.

I do agree that with time sensitive situations greylisting could
certainly be problematic. Fortunately, for this particular box, there
is nothing time sensitive about any of the communications. Most of it
is casual e-mails, and friend/family stuff. So I don't think that
would be a major concern.

I do have one of my accounts protected by DNSBL and TMDA. Since March
of 2003, only 8 pieces of spam have gotten through, and in the first
year of that configuration, logs showed that over 89000 spam mails
were blocked.

I guess what I was hoping for was that by using greylisting, some of
those 89000 messages could have been managed with less resources than
DNSBL or TMDA would have used.

David
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