Slightly OT: Greylisting another take

[Alexander Volovics]

While I can understand that mail server admins choose tools
like greylisting to battle the spammers the 'innocent bystanders'
are often caught in the crossfire.

About 2 years ago my email address 'awol at home.nl' was hijacked by
spammers (presumably russians or east europeans) working the russian
market (for all sorts of completely unnecessary home-appliances).
This lasted about 3 months judging by the bounced mails I received.

As far as I know there is almost no direct action you can take to
stop this. And even if you use another email address your IP address
becomes (black)listed.

The same happened recently to some other clients of my ISP @home.
Add to this the fact that some @home clients themselves contributed
small scale spam before they were stopped.

Of course these activities resulted in a (large) block of @home
IP addresses becoming SORBS listed, and recently relisted.

My dynamic IP addresses are in this block which means I can't even send
any mail to some mail servers and that I am greylisted by others
(like RedHat). Look at the headers of my messages:
X-RedHat-Blacklist-Warning & X-RedHat-Spam-Score.

This can result in substantial delays of my messages getting to the list
and then often not being read when mail is date sorted because of the
wrong date.

Here is an example from my Mail Log:
 host mx3.redhat.com[66.187.233.32] said: 451 4.7.1 greylisted
 for 30 minutes and 0 seconds. (in reply to end of DATA command)

The actual delay is often *much* longer than 30 minutes due
to all kinds of imponderables.

I hope you can understand that I am not enamored of greylisting.

Happy greylisting

Alexander