[AktiviX-discuss] dying under the spam

Alan Dawson aland at burngreave.net
Fri Nov 9 00:17:57 UTC 2007


Quoting ana <ana at aktivix.org>:

> On Wed, 7 Nov 2007, Alan Dawson wrote:
> > 
> > ive just put in place some further antispam and greylisting[1] features on
> the
> > list box.
> 
> This is something I really didn't want to happen... anyway let's see now 
> how many people can't email aktivix addresses because their servers don't 
> deal well with greylisting...
>  

Greylisting is a technique where when a mailserver temporarily rejects email
from new senders.  The senders mailserver will queue the mail and retry later. 
At this point its accepted.

Future mail from a sender is accepted without delay. 

This temporary rejection process is allowed in the definitions of the SMTP
process.

For more detail of greylisting read
http://projects.puremagic.com/greylisting/whitepaper.html

particulary the high level overview

I've used greylisting at other sites without trouble, I think riseup ( amongst
others ) use it.  

The main objection people have with greylisting is the temporary delay it adds
to messages.  I would say that this is mitigated by the following

1. As noted above this is only until patterns of communication are built up, ie
once your mailserver has successfully delivered an email to lists.aktivix.org
others will flow through without delay.

2.  This is only applied to the lists server.  I don't perceive mailing a list s
a process that is tightly timebound.

3.  We can whitelist sites that we trust (for example riseup etc ) so they never
get grey listed.

I have a (small) list of sites that don't behave so well with greylisting, which
i've added to the whitelist

We can communicate with the aktivix list admins the changes and the likely
effects.

what do you think ?
-- 
"The long revolution is creating small federated microsocieties, true guerilla
cells practising and fighting for this self-management. Effective radicality
authorises all variations and guarantees every freedom"




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