If you don't want Email, please just say so!

If you don't want Email, please just say so!

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hi, Emacs!

In recent days, several emails I've sent to Emacs hackers' personal
mailboxes have been bounced, with messages like:

to=<hacker@domain.foo>, delay=2+02:26:53, xdelay=00:00:22, mailer=esmtp,
relay=xxxxxxxxxx.xxxxxxx.net. [128.128.128.128], stat=Deferred: 451 4.7.1
Please try one more time in one hour to confirm.

This particular message I'd already tried to send yesterday, at least
once.  I'm tempted to just discard it.

I'm feeling messed around by this at the moment.  It seems that this
hacker's mailbox will bounce my mail unless I resend it within 1 hour +
epsilon, for some unknown (but inadequate) epsilon.

I detest this "greylisting" which seems to be proliferating through the
community.  Am I supposed to get down on my knees and lick somebody's
boots, just to be allowed to send him email?

I know my mail configuration (using sendmail -q over a modem connection)
is anything but up to date.  I keep meaning to get around to getting a
DSL connection in, which I'll manage some day.  I also know how revolting
it is to get deluged by spam (hey, I get it too).  But I have to pay
telephone bills by the minute.  Each time somebody bounces my mail with
"try again later, luser!" it costs me cents, which steadily accumulate
into Euros.

Please be reasonable, friends!  Surely if you're going to say "try again
in an hour!" (or even 5 minutes), you can configure your systems to
accept it, say, up to two days later.  Please?  That way my costs will
only be doubled.

(And if anybody gets the same hassle sending mail to me, please tell me
so that I can complain to my ISP.)

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Munich, Germany)

Re: If you don't want Email, please just say so!

[Andreas Schwab]

Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> writes:

> In recent days, several emails I've sent to Emacs hackers' personal
> mailboxes have been bounced, with messages like:

Why are you complaining to emacs-devel@ instead of the postmaster of the
affected domain?

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, SuSE Labs, schwab@suse.de
SuSE Linux Products GmbH, Maxfeldstraße 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany
PGP key fingerprint = 58CA 54C7 6D53 942B 1756  01D3 44D5 214B 8276 4ED5
"And now for something completely different."

Re: If you don't want Email, please just say so!

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2006 18:10:08 +0000 (GMT)
> From: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>
> 
> In recent days, several emails I've sent to Emacs hackers' personal
> mailboxes have been bounced, with messages like:
> 
> to=<hacker@domain.foo>, delay=2+02:26:53, xdelay=00:00:22, mailer=esmtp,
> relay=xxxxxxxxxx.xxxxxxx.net. [128.128.128.128], stat=Deferred: 451 4.7.1
> Please try one more time in one hour to confirm.
> [...]
> I detest this "greylisting" which seems to be proliferating through the
> community.  Am I supposed to get down on my knees and lick somebody's
> boots, just to be allowed to send him email?
> [...]
> Please be reasonable, friends!

Please be patient: mailman seems to be in deep trouble lately, so all
kind of weird stuff can happen (I know I've seen some of that).  I'm
sure it's being worked on.

Re: If you don't want Email, please just say so!

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2006-03-03 19:58, Andreas Schwab <schwab@suse.de> wrote:
> Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> writes:
> > In recent days, several emails I've sent to Emacs hackers' personal
> > mailboxes have been bounced, with messages like:
>
> Why are you complaining to emacs-devel@ instead of the postmaster of the
> affected domain?

Because mailing the personal accounts of Emacs developers is very likely
to bounce again with the same greylist warning, and since they are Emacs
hackers they are very likely to get messages from the list, I guess...

Re: If you don't want Email, please just say so!

[Ken Raeburn]

On Mar 1, 2006, at 13:10, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> This particular message I'd already tried to send yesterday, at least
> once.  I'm tempted to just discard it.

If it is greylisting, generally it also does matching on the sending  
IP address, so if you're getting dynamically assigned addresses when  
dialing up, it's going to hurt you.  Though, I think many greylisting  
sites do use much shorter block times -- I think mine is only 4 or 5  
minutes.

> I detest this "greylisting" which seems to be proliferating through  
> the
> community.  Am I supposed to get down on my knees and lick somebody's
> boots, just to be allowed to send him email?

There's a lot of experimentation in spam fighting; it's an evolving  
process.  Greylisting is one of the techniques I like, since it (a)  
can provide a meaningful message back to the SMTP sender in the rare  
case of a false positive, and (b) won't generate bogus mail in joe- 
job cases.  For most mail configurations that actually comply with  
the specs, it's transparent except for a delay in limited cases.   
(This isn't the place for diving into details, but it sounds like  
you've run across a description anyways.)  In fact, I wish the FSF  
would provide greylisting on their mail servers, at least as an  
option; the spam I get through my @gnu.org forwarding address is much  
more than the directly-delivered spam I get at home.  (I think the  
spam I get through FSF mailing lists may *also* be more than the  
direct-delivered spam.)

Your kind of setup, which tends to get hurt by greylisting  
techniques, is, as far as I can tell, very uncommon these days.  I'm  
not on any of the mailing lists where lots of sysadmins hang out, but  
I think yours may be the first case I've heard of with delivery  
problems from a site actually compliant with the RFCs (i.e., trying  
to resend, rather than throwing away any email not immediately  
deliverable).

> I know my mail configuration (using sendmail -q over a modem  
> connection)
> is anything but up to date.  I keep meaning to get around to getting a
> DSL connection in, which I'll manage some day.  I also know how  
> revolting
> it is to get deluged by spam (hey, I get it too).  But I have to pay
> telephone bills by the minute.  Each time somebody bounces my mail  
> with
> "try again later, luser!" it costs me cents, which steadily accumulate
> into Euros.

Some ISPs will provide outgoing mail relays for you; does yours not  
do this?  If not, perhaps you can find some friendly site which will  
let you relay outgoing mail through them, with some kind of  
authentication (certificate-based, maybe) so they don't have to act  
as open relays to do so.  Either with normal SMTP, or RFC 2476-style  
message submission.  (I'd offer, if I were set up for message  
submission and certificate authentication, and if I had more than one  
mail system, to provide more reliability.)

> Please be reasonable, friends!  Surely if you're going to say "try  
> again
> in an hour!" (or even 5 minutes), you can configure your systems to
> accept it, say, up to two days later.  Please?  That way my costs will
> only be doubled.

Yeah, I think that usually can be tuned, too (ooh, and mine was kind  
of on the short side -- now fixed), but like I said above, it's  
probably a changing IP address that's going to hurt you.  Most ISPs  
and companies will have a relatively small set of outgoing mail  
servers, or fixed addresses if internal systems send outgoing mail  
directly, so it usually doesn't hurt.  But then there are a handful  
like you that don't fit that description...

(Of course, I could be guessing wrong, and you've got a static IP  
address, and it's just some site with badly tuned greylisting  
parameters that's causing problems for you.  But it still sounds like  
a friendly outgoing relay would help a lot.)

Ken

Re: If you don't want Email, please just say so!

[Richard Stallman]

    In recent days, several emails I've sent to Emacs hackers' personal
    mailboxes have been bounced, with messages like:

    to=<hacker@domain.foo>, delay=2+02:26:53, xdelay=00:00:22, mailer=esmtp,
    relay=xxxxxxxxxx.xxxxxxx.net. [128.128.128.128], stat=Deferred: 451 4.7.1
    Please try one more time in one hour to confirm.

I don't know anything about this--I have never seen it.
If you were to tell us some specific email addresses where
this occurs, we might be able to figure out something,
either by deduction or by asking them.

Re: If you don't want Email, please just say so!

[Giorgos Keramidas]

Referring to the email setup of Alan Mackenzie, who sends email
in batches with `sendmail -q'':

On 2006-03-04 06:18, Ken Raeburn <raeburn@gnu.org> wrote:
>
> Your kind of setup, which tends to get hurt by greylisting
> techniques, is, as far as I can tell, very uncommon these days.

This depends on which part of the world one lives in, I'm afraid.

In my region, where fast DSL connections and static IP addresses
are charged huge amounts of money, it's not very uncommon to send
email over a dialup line with ``sendmail -q''.

Re: If you don't want Email, please just say so!

[Ken Raeburn]

On Mar 4, 2006, at 10:38, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
> In my region, where fast DSL connections and static IP addresses
> are charged huge amounts of money, it's not very uncommon to send
> email over a dialup line with ``sendmail -q''.

And no ISP-provided outgoing-mail server?

Re: If you don't want Email, please just say so!

[Nick Roberts]

Ken Raeburn writes:
 > On Mar 4, 2006, at 10:38, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
 > > In my region, where fast DSL connections and static IP addresses
 > > are charged huge amounts of money, it's not very uncommon to send
 > > email over a dialup line with ``sendmail -q''.
 > 
 > And no ISP-provided outgoing-mail server?

Yes, at one time  at one timeI had that problem.  In my case, adding:

relayhost = smtp.snap.net.nz

to main.cf (using Postfix) solved it, as smtp.snap.net.nz has a recognised IP
address whereas my dynamically allocated one didn't.

-- 
Nick                                           http://www.inet.net.nz/~nickrob

Re: If you don't want Email, please just say so!

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2006-03-04 13:34, Ken Raeburn <raeburn@gnu.org> wrote:
>On Mar 4, 2006, at 10:38, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
>> In my region, where fast DSL connections and static IP addresses
>> are charged huge amounts of money, it's not very uncommon to send
>> email over a dialup line with ``sendmail -q''.
>
> And no ISP-provided outgoing-mail server?

Yes, there is an ISP provided outgoing-mail server.  I don't see how
this makes re-posting easier, but I don't care about having a long
argument about the relative merits of greylisting or not.  I was just
implying that some times re-sending messages may not be as easy as it
sounds.