On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 12:26 PM, Brian E Carpenter
On 2008-04-07 11:54, Phil Snowdon wrote:
just to be clear - we are not currently blocking _anyone_ with no reverse PTR or non-matching PTR/Forwards. It just would be nice to be able to reject up front in the SMTP conversation with a simple test rather than going through the full AV/Anti-spam weighting system,
Trivial greylisting does that ... no need to worry about who or what is sending you spam, just distrust everyone equally. The downsides are the training period, where everything is initially rejected, and the unpredictable/uncontrollable backoff period that all emails will suffer when they trip the greylister -- especially when you sign up for some new forum (that doesn't take OpenID) and the sign-up email you need doesn't get through quickly enough ... The other downside is the sort of attitude that pushes your spam problem back off to the legitimate servers ... but then again, that's what the 400 series is for, for a suitably generous definition of "error" ... 420 feels about right. It also kicks back about 80% of all incoming connections ... some of those can be "legitimate" (i.e. non-spam, but sent from unexpectedly oddly configured servers). Them's the breaks. -jim