Greylisting is the act of telling your email server to only accept email from other servers which are polite and patient and can hang for like 5 minutes while sending you email.

Greylisting is purported to reduce spam, because it adds an additional barrier to any would-be scammer, which is the requirement to have manners when sending an email (and also to set up a proper email server, rather than using a compromised server or similar to "blast" out emails without any retry mechanism, if you're being pedantic, ig). Many scammers/spammers are known for losing their temper very quickly when you don't do exactly as they ask first time, so this is a really high bar for them to clear.

Due to the fact that a lot of people use a free email service like GMail, Outlook or even shudders Yahoo! Mail, some companies have decided that these are the only email services they should care about, and so complying with spec or setting their emails up properly to interact with other email servers is not a priority. A special shoutout goes to LinkedIn, Priority Pass and Decathlon, for all using multiple email servers, so requesting a new email after the greylisting time (commonly 5 minutes), creates a brand new greylisting record and also gets held up in the queue, making these websites a nightmare to interact with.

A second special shoutout goes to 🪄 Magic Links - the modern internet's solution to people not using a password manager, at the expense of everyone who does, where, if misconfigured correctly to work with greylisting, you can wait up to an hour before you can receive the magic link, rather than the outrageous wait of a second for your password manager to autofill the password.

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