Colophon Web Hosting Fighting – SPAM With SmarterMail 4.0: Grey Listing Enabled For All Domains

Story by: Colophon Editor
August 3, 2007

Over the first 6 months of 2007, Colophon New Media has enabled another anti-spam feature to SmarterMail 4.x, called greylisting for all domains. Greylisting is a method of blocking spam based on the behavior of an email's sending server.

Put simply, when greylisting is enabled, a mail account will temporarily reject or bounce emails from unrecognized or unknown senders. For legitimate email, the sending server will attempt to send the email a second time, in which case the receiving server will process the email as per usual. Therefore, greylisting can significantly reduce spam as the underlying idea behind greylisting is that spammers will not bother to attempt to send an email more than once to any given email account.

However, this efficiency also can lead to initial (though generally brief) delivery delays once a sender emails an account with greylisting activated. The length of time an email is delayed is purely dependent on the time set on the sending server for re-sending and email.

Please realize that this will only happen on the first message from a given sender not listed on your Trusted Senders list. Once a sender passes the greylisting test the first time, they then become a trusted sender. If a message is received from someone on your Trusted Senders list, the message bypasses greylisting completely and is then processed by SpamAssassin and our anti-virus settings and then delivered. To learn how to manually add senders to your Trusted Senders list, see this KnowledgeBase article for instructions.

To disable GreyListing  follow the instructions found in this KnowledgeBase article.

Should you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us at support@cnmwebsite.com or 1-843-727-2990.