Apologies for spam - we will blacklist that account right away

[Harish Pillay]

> After reading about the greylist which apparently bounces everyones
> email for a while, I would suggest no unless you are going to whitelist
> all current subscribers and make it only greylist new emailers.

Yes, that is true.  What I have done on the servers I run - which serves
a userbase of about 20k, is to add the obvious ones to a whitelist.  LIke
gmail.com, hotmail.com and big name companies like sony.com, ibm.com
redhat.com, sun.com, oracle.com.

I had it with spammers who were sending email from botnets that when
I got this setup going late last year, the email I got was from the 20k users
who were now wondering why is it that they don't have much in their spam
folders and they did not need to spend 10-30 minutes each morning clearing
spam that ended up in their inboxes.

I have been running it for now 12 months, and in my whitelist of my
greylist config file, I have about 20 domains autowhitelisted.  All others will
be randomly delayed and autowhitelisted if they show up.  My real world
experience has been that no email that was legitimate EVER got missed
out.

Perhaps I should mention here for completeness that, I had to spend some
minimal time reinforcing the idea that email is NOT instantaneous and that
one has to expect delays.  The SMTP protocol amply explains this principle.
We have gotten spoilt thinking that email is immediate, when it is best efforts.
So, all things considered, the technique works well with spam bots (who get
paid by the # of mail SENT and not by tje # RECEIVED).

Harish