OT - Which greylist milter

[Stef Morrell]

James Gray [james at GRAYONLINE.ID.AU] wrote:
> On Wednesday 05 October 2005 09:02, Scott Silva wrote:
>> Just getting a feel at which greylist solutions are used by the
>> esteemed recipients of this list.
>> Especially interested in sendmail milters.

Postfix shop here, so we're using postgrey.

> Grey listing can have some weird (but predictable)
> side-effects too.  Consider the following:
> 
> Jill is a user from snafu.foo who sends a message to Barry at
> fubar.bar. After a delay, the grey list lets Jill's mail through to
> Barry.  Jill and Barry exchange e-mail from now on without
> delay.  Jill sends another message to Fred at fubar.bar and
> CC'ed Barry.  The CC'ed message to Barry goes straight
> through but the message to Fred is delayed.  Barry talks to
> Fred about the message from Jill, but Fred says "WTF?!".
> Jill gets a phone call from Fred and all three start annoying
> the IT people until (mysteriously) the message to Fred is delivered!

Interesting comedy behaviour :)

Postgrey works somewhat differently. Rather than auto-whitelisting by
recipient, it auto-whitelists by server, which IMHO is more sensible. In
the scenario above, after the first email from Jenny, fubar.bar's
incoming mail server would trust mail from snafu.foo's outgoing server
and thus accept mail for both Barry and Fred.

> Education is the key I think, but we all know how reluctant
> lusers are to have $CLUE imparted.

I find that the general response... "Your email has been delayed, it
will come through soon, it's to help reduce your spam." ...works pretty
well. Anything which gives users less crap tends to be well received,
even if there is a slight inconvenience.

Stef
Stefan Morrell		| Director
Tel: 0870 365 2813	| Level 5 Internet Ltd
Fax: 0192 450 7307	| Part of the Alpha Omega Group
stef at l5net.net		| stef at aoc-uk.com

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