I don’t get much spam. Part of the reason is the audacious antispamming campaign led by postmaster@uib.no, who now not only uses a blacklist but also a greylist. As I understand it from this paper, if someone sends me an email and I don’t already have a relationship with them (I’ve received email from that account and from that IP-address before) their email is temporarily refused. If they have a real mailserver, they’ll try again in ten minutes and the mail will be let through. If the email’s being sent from an infected personal computer, as, apparently, most spam is these days, there’ll be no real mailserver and the email will never be resent. Anti-spam technology is fascinating. Except when major ISPs like Earthlink don’t follow standard rules about resending rejected mail. Ah well, at least our dear postmaster speedily whitelists my friends when I ask him to. I could opt out of the antispam, but I won’t. The reports I get each week about which mail was blocked are far, far too long.

1 Comment

  1. Anders Jacobsen's blog

    ”Greylisting” to kill spam?
    […] mailservers temporarily rejecting incoming mail from unknown senders / mail server combinations, relying on RFC2821 (SMTP) error codes to force the sending mailserver to retry 10 minutes later. […]

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