Greylisting in HyperOffice

Below are some Frequently Asked Questions about the Greylisting technology adopted by HyperOffice.

1. What is greylisting and why do I want it?
2. How does greylisting work?
3. Why does greylisting work?
4. Will my e-mail be delayed?

Greylisting stops most SPAMmers from succeeding at getting unsolicited email into your private mail box, while at the same time creating a log of your "friendly/legitimate" email addresses. It reduces the amount of junk e-mail (SPAM) delivered to our customers by simply forcing the sender's ISP, or server, to resend the email with a confirmation so we can determine it is, in fact, from a legitimate source. By implementing Greylisting we are capitalizing on those nasty SPAMmers' reluctance to configure their mail servers according to Internet standards. Greylisting has shown to decrease the amount of SPAM you receive by up to 98%! Greylisting is simply fabulous for eliminating those irritating unwanted email messages, and we think you'll agree, that's good news for all of us on the Internet with HyperOffice!

With Greylisting, the HyperOffice mail servers maintain a record of three pieces of information when an e-mail is received:

1. the IP address of the machine sending the e-mail,
2. the e-mail address of the person sending the e-mail, and
3. the e-mail address to which the e-mail is being delivered.

Shortly afterward the HyperOffice servers prepare to receive the e-mail again. When the delivery is attempted again - any time over the next 12 hours - the servers match the information that was collected previously and the e-mail is delivered without delay. From that point on, any time a message from the sender is delivered the mail is delivered immediately.

According to the Internet specification, when a mail server receives a "400-level" error, it must queue the e-mail message and try later to deliver it. For legitimate e-mail, this process is standard and mandatory. Properly configured mail servers will redeliver their messages appropriately and Greylisting should not represent a delivery challenge to them. Because SPAMmers send hundreds of thousands of e-mails per day to addresses they do not know to be working, they generate a large number of bounced messages. Acknowledging server responses for these messages, storing the messages on a server for some period of time, and redelivering them again represents for SPAMmers a resource-intensive process that might very well not return sales of their products or services. As a result, they intentionally mis-configure their mail servers. By requiring that every incoming e-mail message to Access Now originate from a properly configured mail server, most SPAM is filtered

Will my e-mail be delayed?
Your E-mail will only be delayed for a short period when people send email to you for the FIRST TIME. Once a sender has successfully been determined to be from a legitimate source on that first try, all other email from that same sender after that will be delivered through immediatly without delay.

E-mail affected by Greylisting will be delayed a minimum of 10 seconds. This is the delay interval required by the SMTP servers in order to prevent immediate re-delivery by already-connected SPAM servers. The message may be redelivered without challenge by the servers for up to 12 hours. After 12 hours, the original record of the message is destroyed and the challenge/re-delivery process must begin again.

Internet specifications suggest that messages temporarily refused be redelivered within 4 hours, and most servers are configured to retry in far less time - often on the order of 5 minutes. The specific delay will depend on the configuration of the sender's e-mail servers.

In the unlikely event that the e-mail message is not received within 12 hours, it is possible that the sender's e-mail server, just like a SPAM server, is not configured according to Internet standards. Contact HyperOffice customer support to help determine if this is the case. Copies of the headers from the bounced e-mail message will be necessary for support.