Loosing spam fight

[Pete French]

> Except that the original mail was talking about greylisting.  This won't
> reject any mail sent from a MTA that correctly implements SMTP.  According
> to the SMTP specs, I am perfectly at liberty to tell you that I can't
> accept your mail right now, please try again later. =20

But isn't the point of greylisting that it *will* reject spam, because
the MTA won't retry. Indeeed I thought that was the basis of why greylisting
is a good idea in the fight against spam.

Ergo the guy is right you *are* rejecting the email - because you can talk
about stndards all you like, but in practice you know that if it's spam
then it isn't likely to come back, and hence saying 'try again' actually
effectively rejects the message. That's the entire point isn't it ?

Of course, most of us *do* want to achive that result - but what the previous
poster seem to be trying to say (to me) is that rejecting mail instead of
delivering it to a separate 'spam' inbox is wrong, because it is not
our place to decide what our users may or may not want to recive and
hence we should not discard email for them without giving them a say in
the matter.

In practical terms, of course, this is what the vast majority of users
*do* want us to do - but in purely theoretical ethical terms the guy is
actually right! 

-pete.