Re: [anti-spam-wg] About DNSBLs vs greylisting - Was: Steve Linford and Spamhaus Internet Terrorists


Dear Emanuele,

there are several mistakes/omission in your message:

> That depends on the mail servers... Quite a few big companies seem to be
> running servers that don't understand the 4** messages, so you have to
> whitelist them

Even those incompatible servers (GroupWise) are able to understand 4xx
messages -- the current versions are fixed.

Or people configuring their mailservers to try delivery just once, or
mailing-list services than do not use to keep queues for performance
reasons.

Are lame senders' administrators an excuse???

Or large neworks with several exit points for email, configured to
mutually fallback in case of deliverability problems. Mails tend to move
from one exit point to another even for days, since each exit point is
considered as "unseen" by the receiving greylisting system.

You can use /24 address range instead of a single IP address in your
greylisting triplets and/or you can store sender domain instead the
sender e-mail address (from the SMTP envelope).

Such tricks are common:
http://www.jonatkins.com/page/software/qgreylist

http://sqlgrey.sourceforge.net/

http://mimo.gn.apc.org/gps/

Moreover, an increasing amount of junk passes through greylisting, as
spammers know about its behaviour, and know that running the same run
through the same bot/proxies 30 minutes later is enough to bypass it.

Anyway, greylisting at least delays the spam, so you can  better catch
the delayed spam using Razor/Pyzor/DCC.

At this time, greylisting is useful exactly for delaying the delivery:
in the meanwhile, there's the chance for the spam source to be catched
by euristic/retroactive DNSBLs like CBL/XBL/DSBL/etc before it starts
its second run.

It does not delay the delivery from the konow contacts...

But it would be nice to increase the initial greylisting delay if the
sender's IP address.