how to deal with spam for good?

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

This is bullshit, milter-greylist is in the ports.  Greylisting
does not require postfix.  Just because YOU are too lazy to
understand sendmail doesen't mean everyone else is.

Keep in mind that Greylisting isn't going to be very effective
for long if a lot of people adopt it.

We run, like most ISP's, a very busy mailserver.  If 3/4 of the
hosts we were sending mail to did this, our server would be completely
overloaded.  Every other ISP in the world of any size would be in
the same boat.  Why should we have to go spend a lot of money buying
a new mailserver that's 5 times more powerful just to handle your
goofy filter?  Long before the number of hosts greylisting got to
3/4 of the hosts on the Internet we would just reconfigure to
start returning the mails back to our customers when we got a
541 and telling the customer to contact their coorespondent and
tell the cooresponent to switch ISP's.  If only a few hosts on the
Internet are doing it, (and none of the major ISP's are right now)
then all the rest of the big ISP's (like Hotmail) will do the same
thing.

If our customer's coorespondent cannot get mails from us and from
hotmail, how long do you think he's going to put up with his ISP
running a greylist?

Long before this happened of course the spammers would mod their
software to simply start retrying more.  If you think about it, if
they are sending a million mails a minute, and the greylist delay is
5 minutes, they merely need to construct a server that stores 5
million mails for a set period and then retries.  The server never has
to store more than 5 million mails at a time.

It's just one more anti-spam filter that is utterly dependent on
nobody else on the Internet doing it.  Typical bright idea from some
tech somewhere that understands just enough of the SMTP standards to
cause a lot of trouble for people.

The only long term solution that is going to work is modding the
DNS records to designate an official SMTP server for each domain, such
a plan has been in the works for a while among the standard bodies
that know what they are doing.

Ted

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Charles Swiger
> Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2005 10:51 PM
> To: Luciano Musacchio
> Cc: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: how to deal with spam for good?
>
>
> On Mar 9, 2005, at 10:53 PM, Luciano Musacchio wrote:
> > I'm wondering, how does this mailing list doesn't get any spam? :),
> > I need to set some filter on my mail server, can some one here give
> > me a hint on this?
>
> Consider greylisting, amavisd, SpamAssassin, and a virus scanner of
> your choice.
>
> Greylisting needs postfix as your MTA at the moment, but is extremely
> effective for very few resources.  Perl-based scripts like amavisd and
> SA are a lot more resource-intensive, perhaps dspam or other tools
> might also be worth looking at if your mail volume is high....
>
> --
> -Chuck
>
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