Following on from the advice in my previous post, I set up greylisting on my server. This looks to have been a good move. I haven’t gathered quite the right information to provide full statistics on this, but I do have a record of the number of messages making it through to me directly: in January to April, prior to greylisting, I was receiving approximately 12000 messages per month; so far, in June, it has been less than 400. Given that the huge majority of the messages I get are junk, this is a big difference. It means that I can let all messages which pass the greylisting test directly into my inbox: most of them are junk, but it is a sufficiently small number (a dozen or so per day) that this is manageable. And it helps avoid getting the legitimate messages stuck in a Junk folder.
Thanks for the advice people.
I’m surprised you’ve taken so long to implement it!
I’ve used GreyListing (Postgrey) for the last few _years_, and surprisingly it’s still quite effective.
I did think (in the beginning) that it would only work for a few months, and then spammers would rewrite their nasty bots to get around it, but this doesn’t seem to have happened (thankfully).
I’ve only come across one site/person whose mail server is too dumb to resend the mail after $random_interval.
Quite a few people I know have just taken the easier route and used gmail as their mail service/server….
David
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