[Greylist-users] Re: Identifying ill configured relays from expired records

[Tom Haapanen]

Allan E. Johannesen:

>I tried greylisting last year and gave up with what I viewed as an
>insurmountable problem of identifying the worldwide bogus smtp generators.
>[...]
>Yahoo has the obvious problem of the same sender/receiver being out of
>potentially different servers every time.
>
>Who is going to list the world's contents of problem sites and keep it up to
>date?  It's beyond my capacity.  Even with distributed volunteers who might
>take that on, how would we know a "volunteer" wasn't a spammer?
>
>I like the concept, but it was denying my site genuinely desired email.  It
>sure did cut down on spam.
>  
>

I haven't given up, but I do recognize the problem.  It's probably a 
smaller issue at corporate sites where the "important" SMTP servers are 
generally well-behaved, but could be much worse at an academic site 
where the email usage patterns vary wildly.

One thought I have on this is enabling individual users to manage their 
own whitelists using a web page -- either turn off greylisting 
completely, or enable specific senders or relays.  Really this should be 
a relatively straight-forward set of web pages interfacing to MySQL, 
should it not?

Tom