Anoying Peter Whalley Spam messages.

[James Wilkinson]

Scot L. Harris wrote:
> Besides that TMDA systems is not a good solution for fighting spam. 
> greylisting at the MTA and spamassassin will block 99%+ of the spam out
> there and does not require the additional network bandwidth and handling
> that TMDA systems do.  

Hmm.

Greylisting picks up on something that spammers do not do but normal
MTAs will: spammers (at the moment) don't bother retrying.

I strongly suspect that if greylisting became sufficiently common,
spammers would adapt. They have adapted to fight other anti-spam methods
(hence the bad spelling and miscellaneous words in most spams).

That means that it's in everyone's interests that a variety of anti-spam
measures should be in use in different places: it makes the spammers'
lives harder.

It means that it's in *your* best interests that not too many mail
servers should use greylisting. Otherwise there's too much of a target
for spammers to attack (by implementing retrying, like the RFC says).

There's no doubt that a whitelist + confirmation emails don't work for
mailing lists. They probably wouldn't work for most people.

They undoubtedly *do* stop virtually all spam (and lots of legitimate
e-mail as well).  They have their place, which is well away from mailing
lists, and for people who only want to hear from a pretty fixed, closed
circle.

James.
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