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Greylisting improvement - Timed disable


netmammal

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I love the Greylisting feature, but I wish there was a way to fire/forget disabling it. Why disable it you may ask? Because my spamcop email address is almost always the one I use when I register on-line for anything, be it a web forum, or to buy something. These days, almost all registration procedures require a mail-based REQ/ACK handshake before you can continue and buy the product, post or search the forum etc. I will often go in and disable greylisting before I submit the registration request, so I don't have to wait for the REQ to get resent (it really does seem like it always 12 hours, I don't care what you guys say is typical.)

So why don't I just burn up a gmail address for this purpose: ...Short answer: 'cause thats why I pay you guys money! :-) Plus Google is the new Microsoft. I love to hate those guys. I believe most of my spam is due to unscrupulous web sites like those I register with who sell my email address and this is the kind of use of an email address which is most likely to to be needed a decade down the road, and most annoying to have to change if I change email addresses. Looking in my password manager, I am registered at over 300 web sites. I have had my Spamcop email address for such a long period that I expect it to be the only email address I will maintain for the rest of my life. (Where you in business in 1995? It was certainly before most non-techies even had email let alone knew what the word spam meant.)

Anyway, after the registration process is complete I often forget to renable greylisting after the desired email has arrived, and only think to re-enable the darn thing days later when I figure out the bloom in my spam bucket was caused by my forgetfulness.

Now for folks who use the webmail interface, going in to change the greylisitng option probably does not seem that tough. You get the REQ, right-click on the provided link to open the web page in a new tab, then pop in to the options, and renable greylisting. But I POP my mail off of Spamcop. If it were not for this, I suspect the only time I would log in to spamcop on the web would be to pay my yearly bill (do I even need to log in to do that? probably not, huh?) (Sorry, I no longer regularly report spam...)

I think there are number of different things you might do to make this easier for impatient forgetful people like me (isn't it for people like me that computers were invented? :-)

1. Create another setting for greylisting, which disables greylisting temporarily. Not knowing the issues you would have to deal with, I can think of two general ways to think about implementing this:

A. PRECISE/STRICT METHOD: Through a strict one to four hour timer (you pick the time-out) which would turn my greylisting back on precisely when the timeout period ended.

B. LAZY/SLOPPY METHOD: Somewhere in Spamcop every time a new email for me came in, it would check my greylist timeout, and if current time was after that, the greylisting would be re-enabled. This is a "lazy"-reset, as it might be hours (days?) until the next email came in which caused my greylist setting to be re-examined, and re-set. Method B might allow through one spam massage before greylisting was re-enabled. I can put up with that.

If you decide that this request is not worth implementing because it would not get used a lot, I would like you to instrument the greylisting option, and log how many times it gets used per day/week etc. That will determine how many folks like me there are who are constantly flipping that switch off and on again.

I will say that the whole greylisting thing would be the reason I would start using a gmail address for new registrations, and since that usage is basically one of the only reasons I keep a spamcop email account around, in the long run this is a major annoyance with using Spamcop. Spamcop's filtering is not good enough for me when it has greylisting turned off. For all I am getting to loathe Google, their spam filters are top-notch, they don't do greylisting, and they don't charge money!

I plan to create a second posting with a different greylisting request, which I suspect is less likely to be implemented, but I believe dove-tails nicely with this feature.

Thanks,

-Dave

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Thanks for the tip, and yes, in fact I have done that. It helps that I have finally disabled the option for asking me whether I want to deal with the last month's sent folder (gosh knows why I ever had that turned on anyway, since I have always assumed you can not send using smtp through Spamcop, and so never sent through spamcop.)

That said, it looks there is an undocumented/poorly advertised way using smtp or imap and cesmail.net. I may switch, since I sometimes run in to trouble trying to send through my ISP.

-Dave

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Thanks for the tip, and yes, in fact I have done that. It helps that I have finally disabled the option for asking me whether I want to deal with the last month's sent folder (gosh knows why I ever had that turned on anyway, since I have always assumed you can not send using smtp through Spamcop, and so never sent through spamcop.)

That said, it looks there is an undocumented/poorly advertised way using smtp or imap and cesmail.net. I may switch, since I sometimes run in to trouble trying to send through my ISP.

-Dave

Good luck with getting anyone to ever even read your concern. For years now I have been asking to get the SC email countrywide blocklists working for China and Brazil. so bad I now use mailwasher with the SAME blocklist used to catch them. JT seems to of left the building since Ironport (Now Cisco) took over?

Seems Wazoo has "left" also, not sure of why, I suspect internal politics

Yes documentation of how to set-up accounts is non-existent to poor

Greylisting I don't really worry about as you eventually get email, within the hour is my experience and just *whitelist* that sender which then bypasses the greylist. Bit of a concern is breakdowns of SpamCop email becoming more and more regular.

This seems to of become one of those companies that are no longer interested in what they do?

Try Windows Android "Password Depot" for securely Automating log-ins (ideally use it from a USB it comes with a virtual keyboard which I use for credit-card use makes things much more secure)

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<snip>

Bit of a concern is breakdowns in SpamCop becoming more and more regular.

This seems to of become one of those companies that are no longer interested in what they do?

<snip>

...This gives me the opportunity to once again emphasize that in spite of the widely-used phrase "SpamCop E-mail," the e-mail service is not provided by SpamCop but, rather, by CES.
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