Greetpause seems very ineffective (Was: RE: Increased Volumes Of Spam)

Michael Baird mike at tc3net.com
Sun Jan 21 15:47:03 CET 2007


On Sun, 2007-01-21 at 22:04 +1000, Res wrote:
> On Sun, 21 Jan 2007, Dennis Willson wrote:
> 
> > eMail has no guarantee of delivery or especially timing of delivery.
> >
> > There are many many things that can effect the timing of delivery. If a 
> > lawyer or other business needs an instant or guaranteed time of delivery they
> 
> > certainly shouldn't be using eMail. Most servers retry within a few minutes.
> 
> this is not the case in reality, host servers that process real 
> quantities of mail do not retry within minutes, typicaly its 10/15/30 60 
> mins depending on how busy the servers are.
> 

Not if they are working properly, they should retry immediately to
another MX, at which time the tuple would have been propagated between
MX servers (using a very short delay of course). Well at least the
greylisting scheme we use does this.

> > I have my greylisting set to only force a 2 minute delay AND this only occurs
> 
> the amount of time anyone sets greylaming to is moot, it comes down to 
> when the attempting to send server, retries.
> 
> if any tech under my control initiates greylisting on any server i will 
> dismiss them instantly, our customers want their mail asap that means 
> without delay, and I pride myself in ensuring that happens, it keeps the 
> paying customers happy, if they happy I'm happy.
> 

MailScanner imposes a much greater delay per message then what you will
see with Greylisting, so if this is truly your goal, you should dismiss
yourself, since you appear to be using MailScanner and it imposes a much
greater delay per message then the greylisting schemes do. 

> but each to our own, clearly you dont give a stuff when your
> customers get mail, which is your business entirely, so long as your 
> cusotmers are prepared to tolerate it, and accept that deliberate delaying 
> of their inbound mail is not the norm with every service providor and you 
> advise them of this prior to their application of your serices, you do 
> warn them you delay their mail dont you?
> 

Clearly you don't care very much either, since you are delaying each and
every mail by a significant amount processing them via MailScanner.
Maybe if you used greylisting you could bring the batch processing times
down though, and bring the delay per message imposed by MailScanner down
a bit (certainly for legit mail).

Regards
Michael Baird





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