Lucketts.net Forums

Lucketts.net has a new anti-SPAM tool called greylisting.It stops over 95% of the SPAM before it is even sent. We have implemented this tool across the board to deal with the overwhelming amount of SPAM everyone has been receiving. If you prefer to get the SPAM, we can exclude your email address or any domain we host for you. If the tool prevents email coming in from any particular source, we can exclude them from the greylist so that their mail passes through. Just give us a call if you are having trouble.

For the technical folks, here's how it works: Normally, when a sender creates a mail for you, they usually upload it to their mail server, and that mail server is then responsible for the delivery. Their server contacts our server, sends us the mail, and then when you check fetch mail it is sitting there waiting for you on our server to download. Sometimes our server is busy, and the sending server will be told to wait a few minutes and try again to deliver. The sending server will retry every few minutes to send the email to us so we can relay it to you. That's how mail normally works.

The greylist program uses this process to defeat SPAM. When someone sends an email to you for the first time, our greylist program tells their mail server that we are busy, and to try again in 60 seconds. When the email sender resends their email 60 or more seconds later, then our program lets the mail through and memorizes that this particular sender is OK. All future mail from that sender will be sent to you with no delay. Normal mail from a remote source is delayed once, and never again. SPAM email does something different though.

Since the SPAM source is trying to send as many SPAM out as possible before being caught and turned off. When a SPAM source is told to wait and come back in 60 seconds, they ignore that and just move on to trying other addresses. As a result, the first SPAM message from a source is never resent, so it never gets delivered. And of course if they try again with a new SPAM later, then they have to go through the greylist again and get stopped again.

Once a message is allowed through the greylist, it still gets scanned for SPAM just like before. But now, instead of us scanning 10,000 mail per hour, we are just scanning and delivering a few hundred per hour. This makes the mail servers run much faster, and reduced the load on our network, and reduces the amount of [SPAM] you see in your inbox.

Technically, no email is ever rejected. At worst, we tell the remote server we are busy and to try again in a few minutes. All real email servers will try again, because that is what normally happens all the time on the internet. That said, here are the potential problems with this process:

1) The remote email server may be broken, or it may be set up wrong, and it may fail to try again. If they don't try again you will not get the message, and sender will get a message telling them that the email to you could not be delivered.

2) The remote email server may be set up to retry after 1 or 4 or 12 hours instead of a few minutes. If this happens then your first email from this source may be delayed until they get around to resending it automatically. Or they could wait long enough that our greylist "forgets" who they are and treats their resent message like another "first" message.

3) Of course a SPAM source could just retry to send their SPAM after a few minutes, in which case the greylist did you no good in that particular case. It did cost the SPAM source time and resources. SPAM sources are always in a hurry, because they get shut down fairly quickly once they start sending SPAM. Any delay we can cause them results in less SPAM sent before they are shut down.

If you decide that you do not want to use our greylist program because you either don't trust new toys, or cannot ever afford to have an email delayed, or your supply of that particular drug is running low, we can Add your email address to a list that prevents the greylist from touching any mail sent to you. Just let us know.

In the meantime, everyone should see a 95% reduction in the [SPAM] being sent to their accounts.