[Mimedefang] Re: On pinheaded ISP's (sort of OT)

John Rudd john at rudd.cc
Thu Feb 1 13:30:05 EST 2007


Joseph Brennan wrote:
> 
> 
> --On Thursday, February 1, 2007 10:27 -0600 Cam <bcp1 at craqed.com> wrote:
> 
>> Tempfailing is also useful for whipping on known spamsites.  I never
>> outright blocked them, but would instead consistantly reject 99% of
>> messages (all except destined for abuse/root/postmaster/etc at our sites)
>> from historically nasty spam hosts with a 471.  that way if it was a 
>> legit
>> site, they would eventually contact me due to queue size.
> 
> 
> If you don't know for certain whether it is legit, DON'T do this.
> 
> Sites that allow users to forward will inevitably forward some spam
> along with the rest.  I do not get a good feeling when some site
> decides to tempfail mail they have no intention of ever accepting,
> and our queues rise and service level drops.  Give us a break.  If
> you don't want it give us a 550 and be done with it.
> 

I send that kind of traffic to the same machine that handles aol, yahoo, 
and hotmail bound email (ie. my machine for "outbound mail to route 
through annoying recipient MTA's").

Because of how yahoo behaves during its "problem phases", the queue on 
that machine runs every 3 minutes. (when yahoo decides to not play nice, 
they throttle you to only take X messages at a time, and if you're 
accumulating more than X messages per queue interval, you'll just end up 
backlogging forever ... 3 minutes seems to be the sweet spot)

I would expect that if you were intentionally 4xx'ing me, when you could 
5xx me, you'd end up on the losing end of that choice.




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