From: Andras Kristof (akristofchappell.com)
Date: Tue Sep 21 2004 - 09:38:10 CDT

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Well put answers in your email, can't argue much. But let me comment on the
last two items:

> > A well written bayesian filter will evolve with the spam, and keep the
> > high efficiency, as ours did for over a year now. The amount of spam has
> > been steadily increasing for ages, but POPFile was able to keep up with
> > it, and it keeps improving with time.
>
> The idea is to use greylisting to kill 90%+ of the spam BEFORE it hits
> your bayesian filters thereby saving bandwidth and server resources.

Yes, this is one of the reasons I don't like greylisting: it saves your
resources by potentionally wasting everyone else's. Because of the retries,
more bandwidth will be used, and mail servers will have to work more.

I prefer a solution --if one exists-- which does not potentionally harm
others :-)

>
> > A good solution does not have to hurt anybody (...but the spammers :-).
>
> And I believe greylisting does exactly that.

Please refer to the previous point.

One more thought:

It is being said in this thread that even if spammers adapt to re-try the
sends, it will increase their operational costs, potentially driving them out
of business.

This is true.

But then all other legitimate businesses sending out large amount of emails
will have to increase their operational costs as well. The damage should not
be that big as in the case of spammers, but it will be there, and adding
together the damages could amount to a nice sum.

I am probably sensitive to this, because our company also sends out quite an
amount of emails, so in some way it affects us, too.

The other thing, that the spammers may decide to make up the loss of money by
increasing the value of junk they send out...

Third thing, I can't accept that a solution which make servers send out *more*
email is the way to fight spam...

All in all, I agree that greylisting can be an effective tactic in the
desperate war against spammers, but I just can't shrug off that uneasy
feeling that it's not the right thing to do. But that's just me... :-)

Andras

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