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MSUNAG  October 2007

MSUNAG October 2007

Subject:

Re: E-mail Issues

From:

Laurence Bates <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Laurence Bates <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 14:12:01 -0400

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (100 lines)

Yes, but what do you tell upper level administrators when they find that a
major funding source is being jeopardized by untimely email communications?
Relying on what you hear from people is convenient but not very sensitive to
their real concerns.

-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Martinez [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2007 1:40 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [MSUNAG] E-mail Issues

All,

I would like to point to my original in-depth thread on the matter of 
greylisting:

http://list.msu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0704&L=MSUNAG&P=R995&I=-3

Furthermore, I would like to go even more in-depth and touch upon 
several things to make sure we are all on the same page about this.  
There are going to be lots of numbers, so please read closely:

------
* A sender only needs to send 1 message, not 3 messages.
* A sender does not a receive a flat out rejection, merely a 451 
Temporary Error.
* A sender not in our database has to go through the greylisting delay, 
sender's who have passed the test should get through without exception
* With a properly configured SMTP server, most senders can get through 
the greylisting process in well under one hour.
* Our SMTP daemons at mail.msu.edu are configured to respond to 451 
Temporary Errors as such:  retry sending the message every five minutes 
for fifteen minutes.  Failing that, retry the message every ten minutes 
for one hour.  Failing that retry sending the message every two hours 
for 16 hours, and so on...
* As I write this there are currently 1,109,396 hosts who we "trust"  
Naturally, some of them are spammers, but most of them are not.
* The above number grows every single day/hour/minute.
-----
The following should give you an idea of the exceptions we make.
These folks completely bypass the greylisting process:
* We maintain a list of exceptions for nearly all .gov addresses in the 
United States (we generate it based off of our logs), currently at 4,242 
listings
* We maintain a list of exceptions for every host here at MSU that 
carries a valid MX record, currently at 341 listings
* We maintain a list of miscellaneous hosts of people who were privy 
enough to go through our Help Desk and make sure their email goes 
through as expected.  We have helped a few hosts reconfigure their mail 
servers to meet the RFC spec., currently at 151 listings
* We auto-generate a list of larger domains who carry SPF records, AOL, 
Google, Amazon, Hotmail, Microsoft and more recently Fidelity 
Investments, currently at 129 listings
* The website greylisting.org provides a list of hosts who have 
difficulty bypassing anybody's greylisting setup.  Including Southwest 
Airlines, MoveOn.org, lists.mysql.com, and ameritradeinfo.com to name a 
few.  This only has 22 entries.
------

You'll note from our stats page:  
http://project.mail.msu.edu/~rrdtool/spam.php   That we have easily 
dropped 600,000 pieces of spam PER DAY since we implemented 
greylisting!!  Of course spam still does come through, and some 
legitimate email does get dropped.  But with folks knowing that they are 
expecting a piece of email and it hasn't come through, they know to hit 
up our Help Desk and we work through to resolve the problem.

I have not heard a single complaint about greylisting until just 
recently, so I hope this helps put things in perspective and helps clear 
things up a bit.  As Nick noted earlier, greylisting is system-wide.  It 
sits as a transparent-bridge between the Internet and mail.msu.edu.  The 
vast majority of people sending to us (nearly 1,110,000 different hosts) 
do not even know they have gone through greylisting.

If there is email _not_being received, the best method for finding out 
is testing with outside sources first, such as Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail/etc.  
Then calling our Help Desk and providing them with full headers from the 
successfully received message at whatever 3rd party address that was 
used.  We will then investigate the issue and determine if its 
greylisting or not, and if it is, we will see if it is possible to have 
their mailer reconfigured properly.  If that is outside of the scope of 
the person attempting to mail us, we will work to add them to our 
exceptions list (which also seems to grow weekly as of late).  Of 
course, if the issue is not greylisting, we will work to find the 
appropriate area to move the issue into.

If people are so inclined, then anyone is obviously free to migrate 
elsewhere.  I wanted to make sure as many facts as I could recall were 
clear before anyone decides to go anywhere else.  It is a very 
trustworthy system and the majority of people I hear from swear by it 
and are quite happy it is in place.

Regards,
./brm


__________ NOD32 2614 (20071024) Information __________

This message was checked by NOD32 antivirus system.
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