Re:Eighteen Years of Greytrapping – Is the Weirdness Finally...
by justsomehnguy on Monday April 06, 2026 @07:55PM
(#47668973)
> Arguments like "twenty-four hours is short enough to not cause serious disruption of legitimate traffic" and "we already know that spam senders rarely use a fully compliant SMTP implementation to send their messages" are 20 years out of touch and completely void of connection with reality.
Just recently I found out a very prominent local service recovery emails are not delivered to the end-user mailbox.
Reason? The email doesn't have Message-ID. Like it get's generated, sent out, "my" PMG box receives it... and throws it out because no Message-ID. Insult to an injury? It was password recovery emails. Regular marketing ones are going through.
But it costs us a lot to keep waiting forever for important and legitimate e-mail. Arguments like "twenty-four hours is short enough to not cause serious disruption of legitimate traffic" and "we already know that spam senders rarely use a fully compliant SMTP implementation to send their messages" are 20 years out of touch and completely void of connection with reality. They use OpenSMTPd, Dovecot and EXIM like everyone else. They have FCrDNS, SPF/DMARC records and a valid DKIM setup like everyone else. "I'll send you this important e-mail and hopefully it finds its way to you by tomorrow." ...Seriously? How many millions of repeated e-mails would such a baseline incur globally every month? "You didn't get it? But I mailed it already an hour ago. I'll try sending it again." Everything about the author's reasoning around greytrapping is long past expiry.