Please use the correct link for xkcd. Some of us miss the alt text.

What about STDPRN? (sometimes pronounced STDPR0N)

I am just wondering... What would happen to classcal music if they started to use Auto-tune.

I'd expect it would sound pretty horrid. The classical instruments have a much looser model of the individual notes' exact frequencies. This is essential to harmonic construction, which is all about ratios. I once read a very good article about this where the author went through a series of calculations for a C chord that produced four different frequencies for the E note above the root C.

Symphonic players have the ability to "bend toward consonance". Auto-tuning these notes to their absolute frequency would introduce a dissonance that would sound at least different, and at worst awful.

Who are the "legitimate" vendors who mail servers don't implement the protocol? It would be a public service if you could help people avoid them.

I suppose this can't be construed as libel, right? ;)

T-Mobile and Capital One. Logs showed no retries for either one. They just took 451 as a permanent failure.

I also find it hard to believe that the spammers have not figured this out. It's not like they are stupid. They try very hard to deliver their payloads. It would be trivial to update their software to retry messages that receive those codes.

Actually, some have. I started greylisting about a year ago, initially with a 1200 second interval. It cut the amount of spam actually delivered to the filters by 90%. Experimentally, I cut the delay period to 60 seconds and the numbers stayed steady, implying that none of the bots were retrying.

Last week, I saw a big run that obviously implemented retry. The logs said they retried at 15 minutes. I went to a 20-minute window and saw multiple retries. Then I changed the retry message to remove the "greylist" term (keeping the "Try again in x seconds") and the throughput is back down to a few percent of attempts, even as I cranked the delay back down to 120 seconds.

I did report the waves to the ISC handlers lists, and one of them confirmed that at least two botnets are confirmed greylist-aware.

That being said, I have had problems with a couple of legitimate vendors whose mail servers apparently don't understand a 451 status. I had to move them to using my Gmail address.

Viacom played a little dirty. The Time-Warner phone number in that screenshot (which was also shown on a crawl across all the Viacom channels the evening of the 31st) is the RoadRunner trouble reporting number. Nice of Viacom to dump on the RR help desk, who arguably didn't have any part of this fight.