Thursday, May 13, 2004

sneakemail greylisting

I've been using sneakemail's disposable email aliases to fight spam for awhile now, but I just recently started using their "greylisting" feature. Very, very cool.

Basically, when an email comes into a greylisted address, it is initially rejected. Regular mail servers will retry at regular intervals, so real email will eventually get through (although it will be delayed for an hour or so). Spam mail servers often use the "fire and forget" method, and they don't retry when a delivery fails. Here's a better, more detailed explanation.

I have a sneakemail alias linked here on my blog, and since activating greylisting, I've had exactly zero spam emails from that address. Every so often I log into my sneakemail account just to go and look at the "greylisting giveups" page and marvel at the coolness of greylisting.

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