in nerdy smtp news

[rmd]

postgrey makes me happy. it's blocking a whole lot of spam on my home machine, now.

Comments

[penk.livejournal.com]

We use it on homeport. Verrahhandy.

[srakkt.livejournal.com]

I particularly enjoy that as a postfix policy server, it doesn't at all interfere with the performance of later text-classification mechanisms.

[miss-bowtruckle.livejournal.com]

I have no idea what it even is!

But if you're happy, I'm happy!!

[rmd.livejournal.com]

it's an anti-spam thing. basically, when it sees mail from a new sender or recipient or from a new place come in, it says "go away. i don't want to talk to you yet". and spam goes away and doesn't try again. whereas real mail tries again (as it should)

so in exchange for a couple of minutes' delay on legitimate mail from a new sender/source, it avoids thousands of spam messages per day without even having to process them on the machine.

[frobzwiththingz.livejournal.com]

I'm totally astonished that greylisting is still an effective first-line spam defense. I was sure that i would have already given up on it years ago. But the logs dont lie; it still manages to block over 95% of the incoming flood on my servers, so i continue to use it...

[smeehrrr.livejournal.com]

It makes sense - in order to deal with greylisting, spammers need to do twice as much work or more, which slows them down, and their game is all about number of messages sent per second. They rarely, rarely retry.

If they start trying a second time regularly, I'll just up the number of retries required. Short of requiring a sending mail server to perform some processing on my behalf, I can't think of a more effective spam deterrent than greylisting.

[smeehrrr.livejournal.com]

I've been running a greylisting agent on my Exchange server for a while now, and it cut down my spam by a factor of ten or so.

Occasionally, however, I run into some busted-ass mail server that doesn't retry properly, and then I get bounces. One of those busted-ass mail servers is the one that my in-laws use. Sigh.

[lionsburg.livejournal.com]

Greylisting was the most effective tool in reducing the amount of spam incoming to apocalypse.org. We were using sqlgrey which does work with postfix.

You go grrl! Smack those naughty emails!

[rmd.livejournal.com]

i'm using postgrey, which seems pretty straightforward. i hadn't looked at sqlgrey.

RAAR! IN YOUR FACE, SPAMMERS.

[lionsburg.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what the state of sqlgrey is these days -- John and I have gotten out of the mail administration biz and gone with Google Apps.

[miss-bowtruckle.livejournal.com]

Wow! I wonder if my IT person has ever heard of this. We've got some kind of thing that sends me an email about questionable emails that it's blocked, but some still get through.

Like, probably 20 a day. Ugh.

*makes a note to check with her*

:D

[cz_unit]

Finally got it stable under Mac OSX 10.5. Very impressive, this plus the RBLs seems to get the spam. Which is good, I was averaging 50-100 a day even after the RBLs (T=bird would get those but the Ipod would be clogged with junk)

CZ