whitelist for greylisting (only)?

IEM

Well-Known Member
Sep 4, 2018
69
10
48
48
Austria
i do love greylisting, but:
is there a way to bypass greylisting for some hosts/networks?

the obvious problem is with large providers (outlook, googlemail, gmx,...) that keep resending from different IPs, thus keeping the mail in the greylisting for ages.

i know i can whitelist hosts, but afaiu, that means that these whitelisted hosts will completely bypass all anti-spam measures. this is not what i want to do.

so I would like to do any or all of the following, but it should only effect greylisting:
  • manually maintain a whitelist of hosts/networks
  • use a DNS-based realtime whitelists instead of a manually maintained static one
  • use the SPF-entry of a domain (or similar) to exclude an sender from being greylisted
also, something i never understood about greylisting: if an IP has been established to be a valid SMTP sender (using a given (IP, sender1, receiver2) tuple), why is it greylisted again when the sender resp receiver address changes (that is: a new (IP, sender3, receiver4))? we obviously need such a tuple to establish that the given IP is pertinacious enough when doing delivery attempts; but isn't it safe to assume that once we know that that IP is pertinacious it will stay so for some time?
esp. if we could establish (by other means) that the IP is from a static range?
 
well, the documentation says:
The SMTP Whitelist is responsible for disabling greylisting as well as SPF and DNSBL checks. These are done during the SMTP dialogue.

and i said:
[...], but it should only effect greylisting

so afaict, the SMTP whitelist does not fit my bill.
it seems to be mostly targetted at SMTP hosts that are setup as mail forwarders towards the PMG and which can be "fully trusted" (e.g. because they are under your control).
 
For the large providers you can just try to set a larger greylist mask (GUI->Configuration->Mail Proxy->Options->Netmask for Greylisting (v4 and v6))

That was the original intention of the feature:
* mail still gets greylisted, but even if it gets delivered by a different IP - it passes if it fits in the network) - maybe try 19 or 20 as ipv4 netmask
 

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