Slightly OT: Greylisting success or failure stories?

[Craig White]

On Fri, 2005-02-04 at 10:51 -0500, David Cary Hart wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-02-04 at 08:29 -0600, Aleksandar Milivojevic wrote:
> > >  
> > Anyhow, in todays world, blocking entire countries sucks.  It kills 
> > mobility.  
> 
> It sucks because it is antithetical to the culture of the net. It sucks
> because it is antisocial. It sucks because spam imperils email as a
> business communications medium. It sucks because I shouldn't have to do
> so due to the acts of a few miscreants. 
> 
> > If somebody who's on vacation or bussiness trip in one of 
> > those countries sends email to one of your users, it'll get blocked. 
> 
> That's incorrect. We're filtering on the SMTP country of origin not the
> sender's country of origin. 
----
It's the digital equivalent of racial profiling - which I would suppose
is the perogative of the smtp host.

It certainly is a symptomatic cure and not a solution to the problem of
spam itself since the source of spam is generally fluid - as someone
suggested earlier, changes motivated to circumvent technologies employed
by the large block of email storage providers.

In that event, greylisting is likely only a temporary solution as well.

I am by no means an expert in mail technologies but the best solution
that I ever saw to this was teergrube - which tar-pitted unknown senders
to make delivery cost very expensive - which must be the source of some
of the venom expressed earlier in the thread about TDMA.

But we live in the practical world and with my limited knowledge, it's
clear that for the time being, greylisting monumentally reduces the load
of spamassassin and both are relatively easy to implement.

Craig