Jim Roberts wrote:
>
> Well, Marc, I kinda liked your "penalty box" idea, but I don't see any
> reason at all to go "open relay." This is why we have "SMTP
> Authentication," so that no one needs to go open relay in order to
> support customers traveling outside their home network. And I can't
> imagine anyone (without several billions of dollars to play with)
> having the resources to provide free email relay services to the
> entire internet.
>
> Also, since a big point of your "penalty box" is that it does not
> block the first "bad" email, that implies your spam filtering leaks
> like a sieve. Even if you have additional spam filtering in place,
> which achieves the holy grail of 100% spam detection, with ZERO false
> positives**, you still don't want to go open relay, because spam is
> not the only reason to keep your relay closed. It's also to keep you
> from having to give away free resources to the entire internet
> population. Your ISP is not likely to be happy with you if you do
> this, since you will be trying to give away *their* resources for free.
>
About the penalty box idea. I don't let one go through like you say. I let one go through to the Spam Assassin level where it is blocked. The rest of the messages for the next 5 minutes are temp rejected so as to not load the server by reducing the number of message I feed into spam assassin.
It's like greylisting but without the unnecessary deleys that greylisting has. It's mostly about catching the same spam but with a lower system load - and not penalizing ham with delays.
