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What is email greylisting?

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You may ask what email greylisting is.This is a new way email users have created to deal with spam.

Email whitelisting and blacklisting is a method used to filter your email.If you don't want email from a certain email address, then you add that email address to your blacklist.If you are positive you want all email from a certain email address, then you can add that address to your whitelist and all email sent from that address will bypass your email filters.

Greylisting has a little of both techniques that is implemented at the server level so that the end user rarely has to deal with the maintenance of the greylist.

An advertising technique companies have become fond of using is SPAM.Spamming is the abuse of email to send unsolicited and undesired bulk messages.These messages are most often sent via email.

Spamming is very easy to do and very cheap because advertisers incur only a small cost of their mailing lists.Additionally, it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings.Because it is so cheap to do, many companies are involved and the volume of unsolicited mail has become very high.

The costs to deal with these mass mailings continue to mount as employees have to spend time sifting through worthless email and companies spend money and effort trying to block these emails.Additionally, the Internet Service Providers have had to increase their capacity to meet the volume from spammers.

The blacklist idea was created so that once you know the address the junk was coming from, you could add it to the list.However, the spammers have found a route around this also.They change addresses very quickly and almost daily.You can end up getting the same exact junk mail from 10 different sources all in the same day.

The whitelist is a little more useful than the blacklist.Spam blockers have been created to try and weed out the unnecessary emails.However, good email may sometimes get thrown out with the spam.So the whitelist is used to identify known addresses that you want to receive email from.All addresses added to the list will not have to be checked through the spam blocker and will not delete by accident.

Greylisting is a cross between black-and whitelisting, hence the name.The most important feature of the greylisting method is automatic maintenance.In essence, the server is able to analyze the email for certain trends and make an educated guess on whether the email is spam or not.The black and whitelisting is just a list of addresses and no analyzing is done.

The greylisting method is fairly straight forward.The server looks at three pieces of information to develop trends on the email.

  1. The IP address of the host sending the email.
  2. The sender address.
  3. The recipient address.

Now with these three pieces of information an identifying `relationship' can be made. If the server has never seen those three pieces of information together in that relationship, then refuse the delivery of the email as spam.Also, all other emails that come within a certain period of time with the same relationship are also denied.

A legitimate Message Transfer Agent (MTA) will attempt to resend an email given an appropriate failure code for a delivery attempt.However, spammers as a rule us a `fire-and-forget' system because they want to get out volume and don't want to waste bandwidth on sending multiple attempts at one address.

Greylisting is able to exploit this weakness to block spam.The resources used to deal with spam like employee time, bandwidth and maintenance is greatly reduced because the spam never makes it through the servers.

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