* * * * *
Some notes from a running graylist server
Man, my email seems eerily quiet now that I'm running the greylist daemon
[1].
I've also identified several problems—nothing related to the code [2] per sé,
but to some unintended consequences of competing anti-spam measures (I assume
it's an anti-spam measure).
On at least two mailing lists I'm on, the sender address (the one given in
SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol)) is unique for every message sent. And
to make matters worse, one particular mailing list (it's a Yahoo Group [3])
has come from over 50 different IP (Internet Protocol) addresses. What I'm
afraid of is the following scenario: a message M, comes from IP I with sender
email address S getting told to try again later, and when it does, coming
from IP I with sender email address S and thus, I never get the message (even
if S doesn't change, the IP address might, and that will still causes
problems).
To get around that, I've implemented an IP whitelist, but now the trick is
identifying all the network blocks to whitelist. So far, I've whitelisted IP
addresses from AOL (America Online) [4] (two /16 blocks), BellSouth [5] (two
/18 blocks), and Yahoo (a /18 block and three /19 blocks), plus some
miscellaneous servers (like my server at Casa New Jersey, just in case).
Update on Thursday, September 6^th, 2007 at 1:40 am
Yup, the mailing lists are going to be very problematic.
[1]
gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2007/08/16.1
[2]
gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2007/09/01.1
[3]
http://groups.yahoo.com/
[4]
http://www.aol.com/
[5]
http://www.bellsouth.net/
Email author at
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