Milter-greylist

We have deployed milter-greylist on all our gateway servers with great 
success. We noticed an immediate and (so far) permanent reduction in 
spam getting through.

I have a few (4 out of 6k) clients who are complaining about the new lag 
in mail delivery. We can handle the clients but our sales force is now 
convinced that we will all starve, become destitute, and have sell our 
bodies to medical research to feed our families.

However, I have found that if I tell sales that our competitors are 
throwing monkey poo, they will demand a truckload of bigger monkey poo. 
So If I can say "Our competitors are using greylisting", sales will go away.

Is there a list of large mail providers who are using Greylisting to 
combat spam? I have the link from greylist.org, and I have found some 
others by searching. Just curious if anyone had a list of known greylist 
users.

Thanks,

DAve

-- 
Three years now I've asked Google why they don't have a
logo change for Memorial Day. Why do they choose to do logos
for other non-international holidays, but nothing for
Veterans?

Maybe they forgot who made that choice possible.

DAve wrote:
> I have a few (4 out of 6k) clients who are complaining about the new lag 
> in mail delivery.

Have you ever tried enabling the option "lazyaw" ? It auto-whitelist ip
and not tuples... With a large user base, after a few minutes only, all
the main smtp are whitelisted and you have no more delays.
Moreover, thanks to SPF, the big servers bypass this (aol, gmail,
hotmail, etc...)

I deployed it on my gw mx too, for a 40 to 60 mails / sec average and it
just works fine.

(# Summary: 3902571 records, 3736960 greylisted, 165611 whitelisted)

On Tue, Sep 05, 2006 at 10:11:02AM -0400, DAve wrote:
> I have a few (4 out of 6k) clients who are complaining about the new lag 
> in mail delivery. We can handle the clients but our sales force is now 
> convinced that we will all starve, become destitute, and have sell our 
> bodies to medical research to feed our families.
> 
> However, I have found that if I tell sales that our competitors are 
> throwing monkey poo, they will demand a truckload of bigger monkey poo. 
> So If I can say "Our competitors are using greylisting", sales will go away.

Why don't you just configure an ACL so that everyone gets greylisting, 
except sales. If they prefer spam to delays, that's their choice...

-- 
Emmanuel Dreyfus
manu@...

Here you go then. Its in use by our facility supplying over half a million
domains. Thats bigger monkey poo than 6000. :) Plus if you need more poo
to fling, we get in over 2000 messages a second. Greylisting has slashed
that number (and about 900 gigs of traffic monthly) down by 2/3rds to
4/5ths or more in most cases. Hope thats enough. :)

> On Tue, Sep 05, 2006 at 10:11:02AM -0400, DAve wrote:
>> I have a few (4 out of 6k) clients who are complaining about the new lag
>> in mail delivery. We can handle the clients but our sales force is now
>> convinced that we will all starve, become destitute, and have sell our
>> bodies to medical research to feed our families.
>>
>> However, I have found that if I tell sales that our competitors are
>> throwing monkey poo, they will demand a truckload of bigger monkey poo.
>> So If I can say "Our competitors are using greylisting", sales will go
>> away.
>
> Why don't you just configure an ACL so that everyone gets greylisting,
> except sales. If they prefer spam to delays, that's their choice...
>
> --
> Emmanuel Dreyfus
> manu@...
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

Rene Luria wrote:
> DAve wrote:
>> I have a few (4 out of 6k) clients who are complaining about the new lag 
>> in mail delivery.
> 
> Have you ever tried enabling the option "lazyaw" ? It auto-whitelist ip
> and not tuples... With a large user base, after a few minutes only, all
> the main smtp are whitelisted and you have no more delays.
> Moreover, thanks to SPF, the big servers bypass this (aol, gmail,
> hotmail, etc...)

Not yet, over the years I've worked with this ISP we have gone from a 
single install of Sendmail to two gateways, one minor gateway, three pop 
toasters, and a auth DB backend. We had 10% spam in 2000, we now have 
24% delivery and I don't count the 120k connections I turn away at 
connection time.

I hate spam. I prefer the 'big hammer' approach followed by 'selective 
stomping' for the small scurrying offenders.

But, lazylaw is next, followed by selective greylisting where needed. It 
all will be determined by who complains and how loudly.

Thanks,

DAve
> 
> I deployed it on my gw mx too, for a 40 to 60 mails / sec average and it
> just works fine.
> 
> (# Summary: 3902571 records, 3736960 greylisted, 165611 whitelisted)
> 
> 
>  
> Yahoo! Groups Links
> 
> 
> 
>  
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 


-- 
Three years now I've asked Google why they don't have a
logo change for Memorial Day. Why do they choose to do logos
for other non-international holidays, but nothing for
Veterans?

Maybe they forgot who made that choice possible.

Emmanuel Dreyfus wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 05, 2006 at 10:11:02AM -0400, DAve wrote:
>> I have a few (4 out of 6k) clients who are complaining about the new lag 
>> in mail delivery. We can handle the clients but our sales force is now 
>> convinced that we will all starve, become destitute, and have sell our 
>> bodies to medical research to feed our families.
>>
>> However, I have found that if I tell sales that our competitors are 
>> throwing monkey poo, they will demand a truckload of bigger monkey poo. 
>> So If I can say "Our competitors are using greylisting", sales will go away.
> 
> Why don't you just configure an ACL so that everyone gets greylisting, 
> except sales. If they prefer spam to delays, that's their choice...
> 

Sales isn't complaining about the delay to them, they are concerned that 
all our clients will flee to someone else.

DAve


-- 
Three years now I've asked Google why they don't have a
logo change for Memorial Day. Why do they choose to do logos
for other non-international holidays, but nothing for
Veterans?

Maybe they forgot who made that choice possible.

eclark@... wrote:
> Here you go then. Its in use by our facility supplying over half a million
> domains. Thats bigger monkey poo than 6000. :) Plus if you need more poo
> to fling, we get in over 2000 messages a second. Greylisting has slashed
> that number (and about 900 gigs of traffic monthly) down by 2/3rds to
> 4/5ths or more in most cases. Hope thats enough. :)
> 
> 
> 
>> On Tue, Sep 05, 2006 at 10:11:02AM -0400, DAve wrote:
>>> I have a few (4 out of 6k) clients who are complaining about the new lag
>>> in mail delivery. We can handle the clients but our sales force is now
>>> convinced that we will all starve, become destitute, and have sell our
>>> bodies to medical research to feed our families.
>>>
>>> However, I have found that if I tell sales that our competitors are
>>> throwing monkey poo, they will demand a truckload of bigger monkey poo.
>>> So If I can say "Our competitors are using greylisting", sales will go
>>> away.

That's good, thanks. I appreciate the responses.

DAve

-- 
Three years now I've asked Google why they don't have a
logo change for Memorial Day. Why do they choose to do logos
for other non-international holidays, but nothing for
Veterans?

Maybe they forgot who made that choice possible.

On Tue, Sep 05, 2006 at 10:57:38AM -0400, DAve wrote:
> Sales isn't complaining about the delay to them, they are concerned that 
> all our clients will flee to someone else.

Enable it only for clients that asked for it, et voila.
You could even have the clients toggling it on or off through a web 
page. 

For now that require building the config file automatically from 
various sources. In the future, I'd like to add a directory lookup 
for recipients in milter-greylist ACL. 

But first, we want the 3.0 release.

-- 
Emmanuel Dreyfus
manu@...

Emmanuel Dreyfus wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 05, 2006 at 10:57:38AM -0400, DAve wrote:
>> Sales isn't complaining about the delay to them, they are concerned that 
>> all our clients will flee to someone else.
> 
> Enable it only for clients that asked for it, et voila.
> You could even have the clients toggling it on or off through a web 
> page. 

Yep, we are going to try the lazylaw first if complaints continue. I am 
hoping that greylisting is just the 'bright and shiney' distraction of 
the hour.

Generally anytime I make a change to our spam controls, that one change 
gets the blame for everything that goes wrong, missing email, global 
warming, loss of life and limb, etc. Once the change has been in effect 
for awhile people forget about it.

> 
> For now that require building the config file automatically from 
> various sources. In the future, I'd like to add a directory lookup 
> for recipients in milter-greylist ACL. 
> 
> But first, we want the 3.0 release.
> 

Wonderful product by the way, thank you.

DAve


-- 
Three years now I've asked Google why they don't have a
logo change for Memorial Day. Why do they choose to do logos
for other non-international holidays, but nothing for
Veterans?

Maybe they forgot who made that choice possible.

On Tue, Sep 05, 2006 at 10:11:02AM -0400, DAve (dave.list@...) wrote:
> We have deployed milter-greylist on all our gateway servers with great 
> success. We noticed an immediate and (so far) permanent reduction in 
> spam getting through.
> 
> I have a few (4 out of 6k) clients who are complaining about the new lag 
> in mail delivery. We can handle the clients but our sales force is now 
> convinced that we will all starve, become destitute, and have sell our 
> bodies to medical research to feed our families.
> 

I HAD the same problem, I just hung in there and didnt barge ... and
every now and then I give them a report of the refused messages,
that calms them down.

Further I checked the average delay, with my setup its about 18 mins.

Further I explain:

  If you constantly look at your mailbox to check whether a new
  mail is coming in you are NOT productive!


> However, I have found that if I tell sales that our competitors are 
> throwing monkey poo, they will demand a truckload of bigger monkey poo. 
> So If I can say "Our competitors are using greylisting", sales will go away.
> 
> Is there a list of large mail providers who are using Greylisting to 
> combat spam? I have the link from greylist.org, and I have found some 
> others by searching. Just curious if anyone had a list of known greylist 
> users.

I dont think you will get that.
People dont advertise to spamers "I do this and that" ;-)



jobst




-- 
We're from the government, we're here to help you...

             __, Jobst Schmalenbach, Technical Director
   _ _.--'-n_/   Barrett Consulting Group P/L & The Meditation Room P/L      
 -(_)------(_)=  +61 3 9532 7677, POBox 277, Caulfield South, 3162, Australia

On Tue, Sep 05, 2006 at 11:22:34AM -0400, DAve (dave.list@...) wrote:
> Emmanuel Dreyfus wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 05, 2006 at 10:57:38AM -0400, DAve wrote:
> >> Sales isn't complaining about the delay to them, they are concerned that 
> >> all our clients will flee to someone else.
> > 
> > Enable it only for clients that asked for it, et voila.
> > You could even have the clients toggling it on or off through a web 
> > page. 
> 
> Yep, we are going to try the lazylaw first if complaints continue. I am 
> hoping that greylisting is just the 'bright and shiney' distraction of 
> the hour.
> 
> Generally anytime I make a change to our spam controls, that one change 
> gets the blame for everything that goes wrong, missing email, global 
> warming, loss of life and limb, etc. Once the change has been in effect 
> for awhile people forget about it.

True, I have greylisting running for more than a year ...


I made a change about 2 weeks ago to be able to whitelist a
"special email address" not to be checked by the black hole lists.

I turned on

  FEATURE(delay_checks,friend)dnl

in sendmail. I ended up rejecting mail from my secondary mailserver ...
what a surprise that was! SOME mailservers which got the (greylist) tempfail
went straight to my secondary (which is correct) server, this one
now for reasons I cannot explain (I had that thing for years) refused
to relay to our domain ... 

Bugger me if I knew why ... and lots of peoples email got rejected 
on TOP of one of our biggests ISP (optus) getting onto SORBS so 
(becasue users not explaining properly) I thought it was all to
do with sorbs ...

I had a "few" grumpy users, so I put it back as it was two weeks ago
and I kow that in a week or so everything will be forgotten .....



jobst




-- 
#include <signature.h>

             __, Jobst Schmalenbach, Technical Director
   _ _.--'-n_/   Barrett Consulting Group P/L & The Meditation Room P/L      
 -(_)------(_)=  +61 3 9532 7677, POBox 277, Caulfield South, 3162, Australia

Jobst Schmalenbach wrote:
 > I HAD the same problem, I just hung in there and didnt barge ... and
 > every now and then I give them a report of the refused messages,
 > that calms them down.
 > 
 > Further I checked the average delay, with my setup its about 18 mins.
 > 
 > Further I explain:
 > 
 >   If you constantly look at your mailbox to check whether a new
 >   mail is coming in you are NOT productive!

Very true.

Also take into account that the delay will only happen for
the very first mail between two persons.  After that, the
tuple is auto-whitelisted, so any further mails will get
through without delay.  If you enable "lazyaw", then only
the sender IP will be taken into account, so the delay
won't happen even for different recipients.

I think the root cause of the complaints from Dave's sales
department is the fact that they don't fully understand
how greylisting works.  Explain it to them, also explain
the auto-whitelist function.  Explain that certain clients
can be excluded from greylisting if they absolutely want
so.  Explain the benefits, create and show statistics of
spam delivery, estimates of saved bandwidth etc.  Don't
forget to mention that spam costs time, and time is
money.  Also, bandwidth costs money.  Thus greylisting
can save a considerable amount of money.

Best regards
   Oliver

-- 
Oliver Fromme,  secnetix GmbH & Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing
Dienstleistungen mit Schwerpunkt FreeBSD: http://www.secnetix.de/bsd
Any opinions expressed in this message may be personal to the author
and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of secnetix in any way.

"When your hammer is C++, everything begins to look like a thumb."
        -- Steve Haflich, in comp.lang.c++