[Mimedefang] Justifying greylisting to management

[Guido]

On Sunday 26 February 2006 18:10, Kevin A. McGrail wrote:
> > Although email quite often is comparable to instant messaging, email was
> > not
> > designed to be instant. Hence delays can and will happen.
>
> Yes, but when the delays are in your control to mitigate, you better be
> able to CYA when an important email is delayed.  I've had people upset that
> email was delayed for 30 seconds so perhaps I'm just avoiding what I see as
> an unavoidable argument.

That's true. It's quite hard to convince plain users of the fact that email is 
not meant to be instantaneous since it so often is conceived as such.

Nonetheless, since by design delays can and will happen it is in my opinion 
not right to use "critical e-mail might be delayed" as an argument against 
greylisting. The chance on greylisting delays can be minimized by 
whitelisting sender IPs, looking at spamassissin hits, whitelisting outgoing 
recipients as future senders or whatever else might fit one's needs. However, 
even if you whitelist the whole world and accept all emails from everyone, 
critical e-mail still might be delayed due to events outside one's control.

BTW, just wondering, how would regular antispam and antivirus measures fit in? 
I mean if one does other antispam checking and takes antivirus measures, 
wouldn't it be possible that one might accidentally reject or discard a 
critical mail? I'd say a delay would be friendlier since that way the mail 
will eventually arrive instead of being returned or disappearing.

Regards,

Guido

-- 
You know you're using the computer too much when:
Instead of saying, "Let's see if the food is finished cooking." 
You say, "Let's see if the food is finished compiling." 
	-- Yossarian