[Greylist-users] Using a spam-trap e-mail address with greylist

Bob Beck beck at bofh.cns.ualberta.ca
Sun Mar 11 09:37:23 PDT 2007


* Jose-Marcio Martins da Cruz <Jose-Marcio.Martins at ensmp.fr> [2007-03-11 03:47]:
> Bob Beck wrote:
> 
> >>>
> >>> When a host that is currently greylisted attempts to send mail to a 
> >>> spamtrap address, it is blacklisted for 24 hours 
> >> Just 24 hours? You could make it more like a month.
> >>
> > 
> > 	No, all that means is it's now got dead information in the
> > list on which IP's were part of a botnet a month ago :)  I don't
> > want to have to manually maintain the list. 24 hours is more than
> > enough for them to either go away, or get themselves back in the 
> > blocklist again the next time :) 
> 
> IMHO, blacklisting some one just because it sent a message to a spamtrap 
> is a bad idea.
> 
> One situation, not the only one, where this is a bad idea is about ISPs 
> outgoing mail servers, where you can have both good and bad trafic 
> flowing from.
> 
> Sometimes you can accept blacklisting this, but sometimes not. When not 
> you shall manage a whitelist of servers not to blacklist when they send 
> messages to spamtraps - not allways feasible.
> 

	That's because you're not thinking like a greylist. 

	If it's on the greylist it's never talked to me in the
past 30 days. So if it mails to a nonexistant address, well, it was
going to bounce anyway.

	That's also the reason it's only 24 hours.

	Once an IP (and OpenBSD spamd always whitelists whole IP's
once they pass, not tuples) is in the whitelist the traps are irrelevant.

	Works much better that way.

	-Bob


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