[wellylug] Greylisting .. does it work?

Daniel Pittman daniel at rimspace.net
Mon Dec 29 12:25:44 NZDT 2008


Ian Beardslee <ian at karearea.gen.nz> writes:

> Actually this is a test to see if the greylisting is working or just
> screwing with my email.

It should be working, although it helps to use a tool like postgrey that
(a) comes with a pre-build whitelist for broken services, and (b) is
liberal about "from the same IP", by defining it as a larger chunk of
space.

> I've added greylistd to my exim config and the amount of junk coming
> into my systems has gone down massively.  But so has the rest of my
> email - I have had some email come in (a test from my gmail account).

If you have a lot of correspondence with either Optus or Telstra email
users then it could be causing you grief: they have appallingly bad
retry times, and pass the mail to a second set of servers after the
first connection.

This leads somewhere between 24 and 48 hours of delay if greylisting[1]
is in play.

Regards,
        Daniel

Footnotes: 
[1]  ...or a genuine overload or fault causes a 4xx error.



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