OT: GreetPause delay

[John Rudd]

No, because with grey-listing the refusal happens quickly.  The problem
he's discussing comes specifically from the amount of time it takes for
the SMTP session to get through its process (because during that time,
the MTA will be sitting idle in memory, instead of freeing up those
resources to other processes).

I personally don't think the end result is as catastrophic as he does,
but he is right that grey-listing doesn't have this "problem".


On May 26, 2005, at 9:13 AM, Rose, Bobby wrote:

> So wouldn't this be the same argument against grey-listing?
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: MailScanner mailing list [mailto:MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On
> Behalf Of William Burns
> Sent: Thursday, May 26, 2005 12:02 PM
> To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> Subject: Re: OT: GreetPause delay
>
> <sigh>
> I can't tell if these responses indicate that some people don't GET
> this
> problem, or that some people don't care about this problem.
> I'll try explaining the issue one more time and then I'm gonna shut up.
> It's all about the negative impacts of shifting-costs-to-the-sending
> MTA.
>
> Let's assume that the "heavy MTA" is running on JISCMAIL.AC.UK.
> Let's also assume that the heavy MTA has got more to do than just send
> mail to users of the mailscanner mailing list. (it could handle many
> mailing lists)
>
> If the subscribers to all these mailing lists have mail admins who turn
> on the GreetPause delay, then the performance of JISCMAIL.AC.UK is
> going
> to go to pot.
> Now, one particular subscriber of the mailscanner list might not care
> that poor list performance causes delays in sending mail on the list,
> but the decrease in throughput on the list server may cause an
> otherwise
> altruistic list-serve admin to decide that it's no longer worth their
> time to provide free or low-cost list servers to a developer/user
> community.
>
> If the typical mail admin starts using a GreetPause, and takes the
> "they
> can contact me" approach, then a list-serve admin will be faced w/ the
> prospect of contacting the mail admin of every person who ever
> subscribes to one of their lists to make sure that the GreetPause does
> not effect machines hosting mailing lists.
> This is not going to happen.
> Obviously, there are times when paying customers come first, and if
> cutting-loose low revenue lists helps, then that will happen instead.
>
> So... Feel free to use the GreetPause feature on your mail server, but
> keep in mind that this is not a scalable solution, and you are
> consuming
> more resources on other people's mail servers than is sustainable if
> everyone follows suit.
>
> Again, I'd like to mention that greylist solutions provide similar
> benefits without this particular liability.
>
> -Bill
>
>
> John Rudd wrote:
>
>> On May 25, 2005, at 1:54 PM, William Burns wrote:
>>
>>> For example, a mail server hosting very active mailing list(s) might
>>> easily have to send 10 pieces of  mail per second. If each copy of
>>> the MTA got hung-up for 10 seconds for each piece of mail, then aside
>
>>> from copies of the MTA actually doing work, there'd be another 100
>>> instances of the MTA in memory waiting for prompts.
>>>
>>> I'm glad that this feature will respect a whitelist in access.db.
>>> That leaves open the possibility that someone could at least add on a
>
>>> feature that culls mail logs for good IP addresses, and drops a
>>> whitelist in the access.db file.
>>> Without that, it seems like it'd cause a scalability issue for the
>>> mail-carrying internet.
>>
>>
>> Or wait for the heavy MTA that is trying to send you mail to notice
>> "hmm, looks like they're using greet_delay", and they send you an
>> email saying "can you give us an exception?"
>>
>> I would personally prefer to have such a postmaster _ask_ me for an
>> exception, instead of trying to guess which heavy mail volumes I get
>> are legit and which are not.
>
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