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Milter-greylist

Index last updated: 2026-04-28 23:32 UTC

Message

re: Re: Greylist vs. unknown users

2006-01-21 by Alan Clifford

On Sat, 21 Jan 2006 manu@... wrote:

> Andreas Unterkircher <unki@...> wrote:
>
>> Only a short note on this. When you only accept mails for existing users
>> and return a error for all
>> non existing users, it's easy for a spammer to checkout which email
>> addresses actually exist.
>
> Do they really collect addresses this way? It sounds rather unefficient
> (compared to parsing web sites)
>

I seem to get most stuff to more well known mail addresses, particulary 
lists@ (lists address) and alan@ (probably most visible in the ports list, 
silly me).  As these are accepted, maybe there is something in the case 
that these stick around in the spam lists whilst rejected ones don't.

I get some sent to nonsensical names like <4a5c07ce@...>  - I 
just can't see the point of these.

Maybe it would be better to accept and dump mail to non-existing users? 
If they did actually retry after the greylist reject, it would keep the 
spam databases full of rubbish addresses and every spam sent to my 
non-exists would be one less sent to real people.  However, considering 
the success of greylisting, I'm not too sure how much notice is taken of 
the rejects.

On the other hand, I get stuff to scatology@(usenet address) which is 
highly visible but rejected.

On the other hand, the address on my website is not popular but that maybe 
because it has a + in it.

-- 
Alan


( Please do not email me AS WELL as replying to the list.  Please
   address personal email to alan+1@ as lists@ is not read. A
   password autoresponder may be invoked if this email is very old. )

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