[AktiviX-discuss] dying under the spam

[mp]

hi,

Ian Gregory wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 10, 2007 at 11:55:04PM +0000, ana wrote:
>  
>> But there are also servers 
>> sending legitimate mail that do not try a second time either, or they try 
>> immediately, or too late for the greylisting to work. The result is that 
>> legitimate emails sent from those servers that do not try again properly 
>> (or, "don't handle greylisting well"), do not get to the recipient.
> 
> But those servers are not behaving "correctly" are they?
> If somone using one of those servers for outgoing SMTP sends
> me an email, and my server is not using greylisting but just
> happens to be down at the time, what then? I don't get the
> email. Sure greylisting would increase the frequency of symptoms
> but there is an underlying problem with the outgoing server
> which should be fixed anyway.

Ok, then I think that I do understand after all. It is not really that
they "don't handle greylisting well", it is rather that they don't
handle email very well - which is not exactly a desirable feature of an
email server. Presumably the necessity of a collective fight against
spam overrides non-conformance with standard protocols?

> On the other hand I accept your
> point about aktivix not being in a position to follow up on all
> the extra support queries which may be created. It is a
> tricky one.

Perhaps a simple message explaining these issues in lay-person's terms
(with links to relevant detailed tech specs) could be sent to all users
and lists, once and for all, encouraging people to encourage their
sysadmins, providers etc. to conform to the standard in order to
eliminate spam as much as possible?

mp