OT: GreetPause delay

[Schmitt, Andy C - JHSS]

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I suspect that spammers may encounter some difficulty "catching on" to this
one. Right now they're sending mail like lightning in most places, but still
we have their throwaway websites blocked by a URIBL usually within a day. How
much quicker if their sending ability was slowed down on most of their
connections?

If a majority used greet_pause and spammers adapted to conform to RFC, the
spam would still be sent -- but the _amount_ of spam someone was able to send
before an alert user or admin caught the latest URL and URIBLed it would be
reduced. Whether spam flow would be slowed enough to make it unprofitable to
send in the first place, of course, is another matter altogether.

I've used greet_pause on my home server for about a year with a pause of 31
seconds (some may consider this high), and it's blocked almost every zombie
PC connection attempt with only one or two false positives. It's been a year
since this feature came out, but either spammers don't consider it a
widespread threat yet (most likely), or they don't want to sacrifice volume
just to cope with artificially slow mail servers.

Andy


On Wednesday 25 May 2005 02:13 pm, Kevin Miller wrote:

> Yeah, but by that time the spammers will have caught on, and we
> decommission this and use some other trick.  Which will last for about 2
> months, and the cycle repeats.  Sigh...
>
>
> ...Kevin

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