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RE: [Asrg] New proposal for spam blocking: Greylisting

2003-06-22 17:40:38
From: "Elric Pedder" <elric(_at_)novitraq(_dot_)com>

...
Regardless, I'm not an advocate of greylisting.  I agree with
the points you and others have made and the most significant is
that it has a relatively short life span.  However it is one of 
the more interesting solutions to appear recently.

I agree with the last sentence, but not all of the rest.  Others have
reported that similar tactics are around 30% effective.  The high
effectiveness reported here might be because, as was said, the high
rate included dictionary attacks.  You'd expect dictionary attack spam
to be particularly likely to be "hit-and-run."

My random guess is that should it become popular, its effectiveness will
drop from 30% to 10-20%, because it will ever become universal and many
spammers blocked by it will choose to send to more addresses than go to
the substantial trouble to send to the same targets through the same open
proxies.  If I'm right, 10-20% is nothing to sneeze at, and is as good as
or better than the realistic prospects of several other, purely theoretical
spam defenses whose advocates promise us more.

Note that greylisting can be seen as a variety of quarantine mechanism.


Vernon Schryver    vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com

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