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Re: [Asrg] 7. Best Practices - DNSBLs - Article

2003-09-08 09:45:34
At 10:21 AM -0400 2003/09/08, Chris Lewis wrote:

 We're considering greylisting as an adjunct to our filters.  However,
 since we have 8 inbound gateways, it could get rather messy.  A
 simple-minded implementation with a half hour delay would have a four
 hour worst-case delay...  Not acceptable.

Whereas a place like AOL (which had over 45 inbound gateways at the time I left) would be much, much worse. This is why places with multiple MXes should implement a shared central database for the greylisting, so that all machines can benefit from the traffic seen by the others.

 Due to how our DNSBL system works (we do our own zone downloads),
 and with a eye to not bashing the DNSBL originating servers too much,
 the latency (for 3rd party DNSBLs) averages around 12 hours.  So,
 greylisting-delay-for-DNSBL-catchup isn't going to help (us).

        Indeed.

 The simple fact of the matter is that open proxy/socks code will
 _not_ queue - so they won't try a second time[2].  I would strongly
 suspect that if you made your greylisting timeout _zero_, and simply
 400'd the first appearance of a given sender/IP/recipient tuple and
 accept the next appearance, no matter how quickly, you'd still be
 getting 90% of what greylisting with a very long timeout would give you.

Fair enough. But then you get people like Vernon Schryver who complain that you're not compliant with RFC 2821 if the sender doesn't implement a minimum thirty minute retry period, despite being unable to provide a reference for this requirement.


At the very least, I'd like to see some testing showing how much greylisting minimum required latency helps, or fails to help.

--
Brad Knowles, <brad(_dot_)knowles(_at_)skynet(_dot_)be>

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
    -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.

GCS/IT d+(-) s:+(++)>: a C++(+++)$ UMBSHI++++$ P+>++ L+ !E-(---) W+++(--) N+
!w--- O- M++ V PS++(+++) PE- Y+(++) PGP>+++ t+(+++) 5++(+++) X++(+++) R+(+++)
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