Milter-greylist

bytemastr <sinkr@...> wrote:

> I was curious to get some comment on this idea from the author of
> milter-greylist and/or other mail system administrators as to the
> viability (at least in terms of not breaking the mail RFC).

I'm not sure my opinion is worth such a consideration, but you asked for
it, here it is:

Your idea will kill legitimate mail from RFC compliant systems. This is
extremely bad. You should not do it.

On the other hand, a MTA that retries every 30 seconds is RFC compliant
but such a beahvior a shame. It wastes peer's bandwidth and CPU, it
fiils logs with garbage, and I can understand some system administrator
will want to setup a filter that does this.  

Such a setup is not annoying for me, as the MTA I administer retry every
15 or 30 minutes. The admins that will do it will loose mail, but not
mail comming from my systems. Such a setup will be annoying for spammers
and badly configured legitimate MTA that retry every 30 seconds. If
enough servers filter that way, it will gradually broken MTA and
spammers them to retry sending at a reasonable speed, leading to a
better Internet.

So in the end if some admins do it, it's not bad for me, and it will
even have a good side effect. If I can help providing tools to filter
that way, I'll do it (but with appropriate documentation and feature
turned off by default, so that someone doing it does it while knowing
the consequences). 

-- 
Emmanuel Dreyfus
Publicité subliminale: achetez ce livre!
http://www.eyrolles.com/Informatique/Livre/9782212114638/livre-bsd.php
manu@netbsd.org