[Mimedefang] Justifying greylisting to management

[Jeff Rife]

On 26 Feb 2006 at 11:11, Kevin A. McGrail wrote:

> Good Point. The use of a multi-month "whitelist for hosts known to retry 
> properly to disable greylisting seems like an excellent fix that would 
> probably solve 75% of the issues I was detailing previously (hazarding a 
> guess here).
> 
> I just don't know if that 1 email that got delayed X number of hours from a 
> non-whitelist host wouldn't be the proverbial spine breaking straw and have 
> a feeling it would occur here and greylisting would have to be 100% removed 
> because of 1 FP email delayed.

Bingo!

That's exactly what I feel will happen.

Now, here's why I used the term "PHB":

We currently use DNSBLs on the mail server in question.  We *have* had 
client communications blocked because of this (and they were "false 
positives" in the sense that the client just had the bad luck of being 
on an ISP that had allowed enough spam to go through before catching it 
that they hit some blacklists).

The PHBs did *not* request that we stop using DNSBLs...only that we 
should whitelist the problem IPs when problems occur.

This is why I turned to this group of experienced mail admins.  I need 
a way to justify occasionally delaying good e-mail to people who have 
already said that occasionally *blocking* good e-mail (and thus 
*really* delaying it) is acceptable.


--
Jeff Rife |  
          | http://www.nabs.net/Cartoons/OverTheHedge/TreeChainsaw.gif