Questions tagged [greylisting]

Greylisting is a technique for fighting spam by initially rejecting emails.

Greylisting is a technique for fighting spam by initially rejecting emails, with the knowledge that valid senders will retry. Most spammers do not retry so the spam is stopped already.

Greylisting software maintains a record of delivery attempts, and when a retry arrives N minutes after an initial attempt the message is accepted.

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Is greylisting still an efficient method for preventing spam?

I've used greylisting on my servers for many years, but I don't know how effective it is nowadays. Is it still good for fighting spam in 2012? Or is the typical spammer MTA capable of resending greylisted emails now?
neu242
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Does SMTP greylisting a) stop much spam and b) stop much legitimate mail?

I've just set up an SMTP server on a relatively little used domain using Postfix and enabled greylisting with SQLGrey. So far it seems to be working OK, and while there's the slight irritation of delays to emails from new senders, I can see from…
Whisk
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How do I get off Mimecast's greylist?

Emails from our servers sent to Mimecast are being "temporarily rejected" due to greylisting. Mimecast has docs on this; they say that every time they see a unique IP and sender, they greylist the IP temporarily. They recommend to keep retrying and…
RainSear
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Is reverse DNS a good method for promoting grey IPs from trusted domains to white?

I'm trying to set up a mail server using OpenBSD, OpenSMTPD, spamd, and pf. The first problem I've encountered is that many large webmail providers - like Gmail - will retry delivery from a different server with a different IP address, making it…
rcampbell
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default value for auto-whitelist-clients in postgrey dangerous

The postgrey manual sais: --auto-whitelist-clients=N whitelist host after first successful delivery N is the minimal count of mails before a client is whitelisted (turned on by…
rubo77
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postgrey whitelist recipients not working

I have installed postgrey and it works fine but I want to exclude some email accounts. So as manual says I added account name into whitelist_recipients then restarted postrgey, postfix but as You can see in log - new mail are still greylisted for…
exxon
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Use greylisting only if SPF fails

I have noticed that more and more people using the DNS based SPF records and I want to enhance my spam filter. I am using SPF and greylisting after each other and my idea would be to use only greylisting if SPF fails or similar. I have searched the…
CSchulz
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Some emails are being delivered, some returned

I have my own VPS where a site is running (control panel: directadmin). When I send mails, some are being delivered (hotmail, gmail, me@somedomain.com ,...), others are not (me@somedomain2.com), others are delivered after being greylisted…
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GeoIP based greylisting with Exim?

I have been using Sendmail together with milter-greylist for many years at several sites. milter-greylist has support for defining greylisting rules based on GeoIP database lookups. This is very convenient for companies who do not do business…
snap
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Delivery Status Notifications not being retried

I was checking my ISP's Out of Office reply system and I found that although they sent a message to my server, because my server replied with a 4xx error code, the server did not attempt to re-deliver the message. I did a further check on one of…
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Howto configure postfix to correctly handle greylisting when forwarding mail

I have a postfix setup in which I use virtual_alias_maps to forward / alias mails to other addresses. In a specific sample scenario, my server would serve as an MX for the domain mydomain.com and I configured the following virtual…
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How can I skip greylisting for servers with a valid SPF Record in Postgrey?

I typically do not use grey listing as it doesn't play nice with multiple mx servers, but I do like preventing direct-access attempts to email me (use an MTA, or don't send email). I would like to prevent grey-listing for any server that has a valid…
Jacob Evans
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How does postgrey handle changing FQDNs?

Let's say I receive emails from the following clients: mail2.dx300.mail.net mail4.dx121.mail.net mail5.dx121.mail.net Even though these are all from the same service (e.g. LinkedIn or MailChimp), postgrey sees them as entirely different clients. How…
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Postgrey not greylisting incoming emails

I migrated my server to a new provider and have postfix & everything else back up and running, but am not getting incoming mails greylisted anymore when I have postgrey running. I was on CentOS 5.7 previously and now on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS postgrey is…
funkadelic
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What's the ideal greylist scheme with multiple MX in different locations?

We currently have two MX servers in the same physical rack, they are sharing the same greylist database, and everything seems to work well. The two MX have different priorities and they are on two different physical servers, so we get redundancy if…
Luke404
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