Re: new plugin: naughty & nice

On May 26, 2012, at 2:32 PM, Jared Johnson wrote:

>> Been there, tried that. I've had mx2.freebsd.org soft 4xx blocked for 1
>> day at a time for over a week. Besides the increased number of connections
>> to my server, using a 4xx error makes almost no difference.  As soon as
>> the penalty box expires, the queued ham and spam pour in and mx2 gets
>> tossed back into the penalty box. For most messages, a 4xx error ends up
>> being the same as 5xx error except with a delay.
> 
> I don't know if I'm typical, but I would personally be very hesitant to
> reject or even defer a server such as mx2.freebsd.org, which is known to
> send legitimate mail, 

Then we agree. I consider blocking mail from even "mostly good" servers to be a bug. Having to discover this and manually whitelist to prevent it is also a bug. Which is why I'm exploring a "karma" based solution instead. 

> controlled by spammers or botnets is not going to
> retry messages indefinitely like this, so it should be much more
> susceptible to a 'penalty box' regardless of whether you reject or defer.

In my observations, there's been very little difference in appearance between a good server innocently retrying, and a naughty server trying a new spam. 

Matt