On Thursday, September 2, 2004, 10:09:52 AM, Ryan Thompson wrote:
Further, I think *not* having a greylist leads to errors and controversy, because even the most careful submitters will (thanks to human nature) have a tendency to want to put domains *somewhere*. It's damned hard to admit that somedomain.com appears in a dozen local spams, has a bunch of NANAS hits, but, jeez, it's so *close*, but maybe, just maybe, they have some legit uses. A greylist ought to keep the size of our blacklist smaller, so that it really *is* as close to a pure blacklist as we can make it.
Borderline: The borderline cases will now have a proper home, and rely less on submitters' judgement.
A greylist could therefore become a dumping ground for submissions people were too lazy to research or categorize. Just because something is difficult to categorize does not mean it should get blocked, even for individual home users.
That could also result in some full spammers not going onto the blacklists where they belong, basically due to lack of enough effort to properly categorize them.
The usefulness of such a list would tend to undermine itself due to factors like that.
We need to try to think through as many of the consequences as possible ahead of time.
Jeff C.