On Thursday, September 2, 2004, 7:09:27 AM, Chris Santerre wrote:
I am officially proposing a greylist surbl.
We are going to see more and more of this stuff. We might as well deal with it now. I'm suggesting a greylist for all spammers that ride that line. Like the euniverse junk we have been talking about.
1)We DO NOT include it in multi. 2)We SCREAM to the world that it WILL hit some legit, and that only hard liners should use. 3)We DON'T remove domains unless they go completely black, or have no NANAS hits for 3-4 months. 4)See number 2 again. 5)We tell people it is completely optional and to see number 2.
I predict it would be used more for personal emails. IT also gives us an in between mechanism. Rather then list or no list. We get a grey list we desperately need.
I'd rather focus on black lists for the upstream mail servers.
Greylists are messier, more time-consuming, difficult to categorize, error-prone, controversial, and subjective than black or white lists. We can already see how much effort a few borderline cases consume. Creating and maintaining these as a third category would multiply that.
If we make greylists, they will be misapplied, legitimate mails will be blocked, people will (somewhat rightly) complain, and our reputation will be damaged.
I know it would perhaps be more fun to play the "find every spammer" game, but I think we should instead focus on improving the quality of the data we already have.
When we can get the FP rate of WS below 0.01%, then maybe we can think about greylists.... ;-)
Jeff C.