SPAM (on list) was:Re: classiccmp list (sort of) help requested

It was written... Unfortunately most of our customers get really upset when an email doesn't arrive almost instantaneously. But moreover, believe it or not I've found a fair number of servers that take the temporary rejection as a permanent one and never try again. Customers won't accept this. Yes, I know it's easy to say in an ivory tower mentality "well, that's their fault", but in a business setting we don't have the luxury of the ivory tower. Der Mouse mentioned his Shim program... We already use something similar. It is a poor mans LDAP, where it allows the front ends to check any backend (based on mailertable) to see if it's a valid account at the RCPT stage. This blocks all of the spam coming in that is for unknown users in valid domains (which is around 80% of all the spam we get). It does so without wasting cpu cycles to scan or lookup anything on the bl lists. It also maintains it's own cache of positive and negative results so it doesn't have to keep bugging the backend (you can set the timeout for pos & neg results separately). It also gets rid of some of the overhead of building up and tearing down the tcp connection to the back end host by attempting to utilize already open sessions. The product is milter-ahead, put out by snert software (snertsoft.com I believe). It costs about $99 for a site license. They have some other milter products which do what milter-ahead does and much more, but they are of course much more expensive. As far as bang-for-the-buck, to have my front ends know about valid backend mailboxes without Lightweight(not a chance)DAP, and reject well over 80% of the spam with no processing - I was quite happy with the purchase. Jay West