The Blog of Harald

So maybe I spoke too soon; in “greylist results”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/2004/07/14/greylist-results/ I said that my spam volume had gone way down. Well, it has come back up again. I’ll have to write scripts to prove it, but I have a theory.

Machines owned by spammers are being used relatively infrequently, maybe to reduce the chances of getting detected and blacklisted? So the first time a spam host shows up, it gets greylisted. But if they show up again a day or a week later, they get past the greylist filter, because they’re now in the cache (but haven’t been expired yet).

Maybe a fix would be to put two cache timeouts in; the first would be for machines that have not yet successfully delivered a message i.e. by retrying the original delivery), and would be relatively short, probably less than a day. The second would be the existing long timeout for machines that have already passed the first test.

That would eliminate spam machines that only show up infrequently. I don’t know whether it is worth the effort, though.

On the plus side, greylisting _is_ still keeping out the virus traffic…