Hi all.

I have turned on graylisting in my account after being flooded with more spams than I can sanely report in a day.

I am a member (and moderator) of two Yahoo Groups. Now, there is a strange thing about graylisting and Yahoo Groups messages. The graylisting doesn't go by the "From" header of the mail. Instead, it goes by the "Return-Path" header (plus IP). For Yahoo Groups messages, this header looks like this:

Return-Path: <sentto-5325055-5265-1243710161-herouth=spamcop.net[at]returns.groups.yahoo.com>

And the string of digits and dashes in the middle there is apparently unique for every message.

This means that the graylist delays each and every Yahoo Groups message sent to me. Eventually, of course, I get the messages, but this is rather annoying.

Does anybody know of a way to work around this? I don't seem to have access to the "allowed" section of the graylist - I can allow blocked originators, but I can't see what's allowed. And even if I had access - I'd need the ability to put wildcards in allowed originators.

Or am I mistaken and the Allowed list is the normal spamcop whilelist? I believe the whitelist is based on the "From" header, but I may be mistaken. Anyway, it doesn't allow wildcards, either.

Is it necessary for you to get all postings via email? I am a member of two Yahoo groups and I use the RSS link to get notified of any postings. I use the RSS link with Firefox but Thunderbird also does an RSS according to the help pages.

This may be a way around the graylist delay.

Just putting returns.groups.yahoo.com into your whitelist should take care of this. The whitelist matches everything on the right of what you put on the list so groups.yahoo.com, yahoo.com, and com should also work, but will allow a lot more as well.

Just add "returns.groups.yahoo.com", the constant right-hand portion of the Return-Path: to SC Mail's Personal Whitelist. This is also whitelisting's (and blacklisting's) partial equivalent to wildcarding, thus Blacklist CN will stop any email with a Return-Path, From or Sender purporting to be in China.

The only side effect is that Yahoo groups mail will be whitelisted even for spam with a high SpamAssassin level.

More discussion in the Greylisting and How I use SC Mail Topics.

HTH

Thanks, michaelanglo and StevenUnderwood. So the personal whitelist is also relevant for the graylist. I'll do what you two suggested. If I start receiving a lot of spam because of that, I'll reconsider.

Lking - thank you. I don't actually use RSS in my day-to-day work so I'm not sure how this will work out. If their RSS is as "good" as their web interfaces (which don't support Unicode), then it wouldn't be much good...

It was just a thought. I am a member of one public Yahoo group that has implemented RSS and it works for me. For each new post the subject runs across the markey (sp) in my browser. Not a large group and so-so active.