Re: [gentoo-user] Greylisting vs. reject_rbl_client

[kashani]

Grant wrote:
> Do you think the reject_rbl_client stuff is safer than greylisting?
>
> - Grant

1. Blacklists have the HIGHEST false positive rate of any anti-spam 
technique other than sending all mail to /dev/null. 34%
http://www.paulgraham.com/falsepositives.html

2. Blacklists block the least amount of spam. 24%
So it's wrong more often than right.

3. All Blacklists are run by jackasses. Yes, even the ones you like.
http://www.internetnews.com/xSP/article.php/8_1143551
http://www.peacefire.org/anti-spam/group-statement.5-17-2001.html
http://www.networkworld.com/research/2001/0910feat.html

and far too much personal experience*

	In my experience over the past two to three years greylisting and 
simple header checks have blocked 99% of spam before it gets to the 
queue and generated less admin overhead with false positives and other 
nonsense. I'd call its accuracy a solid 99.9% since I've only had to 
whitelist three sets of servers over the years, YMMV. It might not be 
99.9 for everyone, but it will be far better than blacklisting. There 
are some quirks with greylisting, but overall it's been very effective 
without much downside.

I can't say enough bad things about blacklisting.

kashani

* The first ISP I worked for actually hosted public.com which has 
probably been the most hijacked domain ever. It's a fun Monday morning 
when some moron decided to block your entire ISP without actually 
looking at the headers. It gets slightly less fun the fifth and sixth 
time it happens. Homicide is considered when they assume they are 
automatically right, are as rude as possible to you, and then stall for 
a day before they grudgingly remove you.
-- 
gentoo-user@g.o mailing list