[colug-432] Recent change in retry behavior from large e-mail sites, affecting greylisting?

[Rob Funk]

On Wednesday, January 12, 2011 09:20:17 am Joshua Kramer wrote:
> I've always had problems sending to and receiving from MSN and Hotmail
> because apparently Microsoft doesn't like to deal with mail servers behind
> residential DSL IP addresses.  So if I have someone who I know to be on a
> MS-based address I just give them my gmail account information.

They may be using a blocklist that prevents them from receiving mail from IP 
addresses whose Terms Of Service prohibit running mail servers. Many home 
ISPs add their address blocks to such blocklists themselves, and many mail 
servers (including mine) use such lists. Mail coming from residential 
addresses is almost always spam or malware from zombie machines.

I think my only regular Hotmail-using correspondent remaining is my Mom, and 
I did successfully get a message she sent on Dec 22.

> I don't know about Yahoo.  I'll have to create a test account there and
> see what it does wrt my greylist setup.

I've long had trouble sending TO Yahoo from my server, to the point that I've 
started gently suggesting that my friends there switch to Gmail. Instead we 
usually end up communicating by Facebook or Twitter or SMS (spam/antispam is 
killing email), or occasionally my own Gmail account.

I just sent a test from my Yahoo account to my Funknet account..... Yahoo 
retried after 2 minutes and 21 seconds, then again 3 minutes 30 seconds 
later... at which point it passed my greylisting and (disturbingly) failed my 
Bayes check. Which I guess says something about how little I get non-spam 
from Yahoo.