New Feature: Greylisting *UPDATED* Options

[trevorb]

We have just added a new spam-blocking feature called greylisting to our mailgates. When enabled, greylisting delays messages from unseen e-mail addresses for a short time (configured to 30 minutes right now). Messages from addresses that have been seen before are allowed through immediately.

"Good" mail relays, like your friendly neighborhood ISP, are set to automatically retry delayed messages periodically, so all of your good e-mail will still get through. Spammers, however, often use relays that don't automatically retry, so a lot of spam will simply never be delivered. This is all transparent to both you and the people e-mailing you, and the only side effect is a short delay the first time someone e-mails you. Our testing over the last few days has shown as much as 75% of spam to a specific e-mail address being rejected by the greylist before it ever hits our spam filters. Spam blocked by the greylist is not delivered at all, and will not show up in your Held Mail folder.

More information about greylisting is available at greylisting.org.

We have done some testing and the results have been very positive, but obviously results are not always the same when escalated from a few accounts to thousands. This feature should be considered "beta" for now.

To enable greylisting on your account:
1) Login to webmail
2) Click "Options" on the top menu bar
3) Click "Spamcop Tools"
4) Click "Manage your email forwarding, password, mail report, and greylist settings. "
5) Click the "Enable greylisting" checkbox, and press Submit

Please use this forum to discuss your results. We are interested in hearing about how well this feature works for you. If you encounter any problems, send an e-mail to support[at]spamcop.net.

***UPDATE***
We have added management pages so you can view the messages that are pending in your greylist, and the messages that have been permanently blocked in the past 72 hours. Click Options->Spamcop Tools->Manage Greylist - ... to view your greylist entries. From these pages you can manually unblock senders.

~Trevor