Curious about words? (Note on the grey benefits of greylisting)

For some time, I've been subscribing to an email newsletter produced by Michael Quinion, UK: "Worldwide Words Newsletter" (see banner below, and website here: http://www.worldwidewords.org ).

Quinion has a really nice way of linking stories about the origins and uses of words to social history. Sometimes something of practical significance appears, like the following:

"Waitlisting Jeremy Weatherford pointed out that there is another term used in the email field thats close in sense: greylisting , which is the automatic temporary rejection of incoming email from unknown senders with instructions to the originating server to send the message again after a delay. Spammers systems dont usually bother to re-queue messages, so its a simple way of ensuring its genuine."

But is it so simple?

Being curious, I tried to learn more about greylisting, and came upon this carefully stated opposition to the practice (written in 2007):

"Greylisting: The worst thing to happen to email since spam" ( http://articles.marco.org/238 ).

Often, when I am working on a paper with multiple coauthors, fast email delivery is very useful. Greylisting can - among other things - make email delivery slow. Better apparently to use a more intelligent or effective spam filtering system, to keep email fast.

WORLD WIDE WORDS NEWSLETTER
Issue 869: Saturday 15 February 2014