Nothing stops you from doing greylisting today, and it can be a very effective means of stopping most spam. There are tons of software solutions for greylisting.
Some require manual approval first time. Some sends a message back to ask the sender to do something (anything from just clicking a link to entering a captcha) and relies on you to do manual approval now and again (to catch automated but valid messages).
Some just defers delivery and waits for a second delivery attempt (because most spammers practice "fire and forget" and just ignores errors). Our office mail server is in the latter category - first time someone e-mails us,a second delivery attempt needs to happen after 10 minutes for the message to get through (it's ok if there are attempts in between too, but the assumption is that most of even the few spammers that retry will go away too quickly to send another attempt after 10 minutes). It gets rid of the vast majority of our spam before our real spam filter even kicks in.
Nothing stops you from doing greylisting today, and it can be a very effective means of stopping most spam. There are tons of software solutions for greylisting.
Some require manual approval first time. Some sends a message back to ask the sender to do something (anything from just clicking a link to entering a captcha) and relies on you to do manual approval now and again (to catch automated but valid messages).
Some just defers delivery and waits for a second delivery attempt (because most spammers practice "fire and forget" and just ignores errors). Our office mail server is in the latter category - first time someone e-mails us,a second delivery attempt needs to happen after 10 minutes for the message to get through (it's ok if there are attempts in between too, but the assumption is that most of even the few spammers that retry will go away too quickly to send another attempt after 10 minutes). It gets rid of the vast majority of our spam before our real spam filter even kicks in.