Slightly OT: Greylisting success or failure stories?

[Craig White]

On Sun, 2005-02-06 at 18:36 -0600, Thomas Cameron wrote:

> 
> I have looked at tarpits, and in my opinion, they don't really do any good. 
> Almost no spam traffic actually comes from the spammers.  It comes from bots 
> or something like that.  While tarpitting might slow an insignificant amount 
> of the spam down, I don't think it's enought to make it worth the hassle of 
> setting up the tarpit.
> 
> Spammers are also pretty retarded - I've got an e-mail address that I 
> stopped using over 4 years ago.  I still own the domain, though, and there 
> is an MX record for it.  I am amazed to see that this old e-mail address 
> which has been inactive for over 4 years still gets several *hundred* spam 
> messages a day.  The address wound up on some address list which has been 
> sold and resold between spammers for years.  They don't care that the 
> addresses are no good.
----
A 'spammers' concept is to throw as much as you can against the wall and
hopefully something somewhere will stick.

A 'tar pit' concept is to make it 'expensive' for tossing objects
against your wall either by tying the system up for as long as feasible
or forcing them to keep retrying to make the delivery.

Wherever the spam originates - be it backdoor on some infected users
computer or a system dedicated for the purpose, it still can only
deliver so many emails at a time and if you can slow them down, it's
progress.

Whether it's worth the effort to set up a tar pit, everyone would have
to answer for themselves and it is certainly something that raises the
ire of some people. This is probably what makes greylisting the next
best option at the moment.

Craig