Greylisting

What is Greylisting?

Greylisting is an anti-spam technique which we've added to our mail servers to help stop spam from reaching your mailbox. We've found it to be very effective so far, and typically has minimal impact on other e-mail messages.

How does it work?

When another mail server tries to send an e-mail message to your mailbox, our mail server returns a temporary error, which asks the other server to try again later. Standard mail servers will queue the message for a short time, and keep trying until the message is successfully sent.

Our server also records into a database who the e-mail was from, who it was to, and the server which was trying to send it. When the other server does try to send the message again, our server checks the database, sees that it's the second try for this particular message, and accepts the message for delivery.

This is effective against spam, because spammers generally run non-standard mail servers which don't bother to retry later. They simply fail on the first attempt and move on to the next address in their long list.

This is effective against viruses and worms which propagate via e-mail for the same reason -- they are generally not written to retry later.

Why might I want to opt out of this?

While the vast majority of mail servers comply with the rules for sending e-mail (the technical phrase for this is "RFC compliant"), we've encountered a small few which are not. These either retry sending much later (many hours later), or never retry sending.

If you frequently receive e-mail from someone whose mail server does not retry sending normally, you may uncheck the box below. This will instruct our mail server to not greylist your e-mail, and always accept incoming messages for you on the first attempt.

How do I opt out of this?

You are able to change your e-mail greylisting settings online, https://ipmom.iphouse.com/greylist.php

Contacting Tech Support

Support	612-337-6340		Mon - Fri	8 am - 8 pm		support@iphouse.com
	877-337-6340		Sat	11 am - 4 pm