****Re: ****Re: [OT] HELP!!! mail attack

[max]

Craig White wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-04-11 at 16:16 -0700, Les wrote:
>> On Fri, 2008-03-28 at 11:06 -0700, Craig White wrote:
>>> On Fri, 2008-03-28 at 10:17 -0700, Les wrote:
>>>> On Fri, 2008-03-28 at 09:35 -0700, Craig White wrote:
>>>>> On Fri, 2008-03-28 at 08:29 -0700, Les wrote:
>>>>>> But is 99.99% delivery sufficient?  I receive more than 150 emails per
>>>>>> day (ones that I am interested in), and every few days I need to receive
>>>>>> certain emails about customer relations and ongoing projects.  99.99
>>>>>> percent means I would miss one every 66 days.  If the one that I miss
>>>>>> cost me a contract, it might not matter whether I received the rest or
>>>>>> not.  Currently I have to parse through the junk mail locally and
>>>>>> remotely about once a week.  the ISP junk folder often has more than
>>>>>> 1200 emails in it.  THe local one about 30.  This adds about 1/2 day of
>>>>>> overhead every week to recapture what should have come through.
>>>>>> Personally I think the world needs to eliminate spam, or at least make
>>>>>> every effort to seriously reduce it.
>>>>> ----
>>>>> but your example completely misses the point.
>>>>>
>>>>> the 'Junk' directory is a result of some type of agent parsing accepted
>>>>> e-mail, scoring it and redirecting it based on a score.
>>>>>
>>>>> The point of greylisting is always about (or virtually always...depends
>>>>> upon various implementations anyway) sender/recipient/smtp server
>>>>> 'tuples' and 'Temporary Failure' /SMTP result codes 450 and whether the
>>>>> sender attempts redelivery.
>>>>>
>>>>> http://www.greylisting.org/
>>>>>
>>>>> I would suggest that rather than prove the argument about the problems
>>>>> with greylisting, you have proven the opposite because if you can lop
>>>>> approximately 70% of that junk mail off the top via greylisting, you
>>>>> wouldn't have to look through so much 'junk' to find the false positives
>>>>> that inevitably occur with any type of spam scoring system.
>>>>>
>>>>> Craig 
>>>> I cannot argue the value of greylisting.  But efficiency is in the eye
>>>> of the beholder.  My time is limited.  My work valuable, and my customer
>>>> correspondence is dictated by my customer, not my email policy.  I am at
>>>> the mercy of the ISP here, and the customer.  Yet I am the one who
>>>> suffers loss, not the ISP, not the customer who will find someone to do
>>>> his work.  Yet you as the web person thinks this is effective.  I cannot
>>>> speak to school systems, only professional uses.  Time is money and lost
>>>> opportunity is even more valuable, resulting in loss that cannot be
>>>> measured, yet ultimately may determine the success or failure of my
>>>> business.
>>>>
>>>> 	I would like to take this thought "out of the box".  The methods
>>>> currently in place, grey listing, parsing for key words, and other
>>>> simplistic means, while effective at reducing traffic are not really the
>>>> desired solution by users, who would like 100% success in getting their
>>>> desired email.  And while I cannot spout statistics about loss, I know
>>>> it happens from personal experience.  The question at hand is how to
>>>> avoid even more loss.  It is a quality issue, and today the quality
>>>> standard is not 99.99%, it is 99.9999% (six nines or six sigma) in most
>>>> industries.  To say that 99.99 is good enough is the path for GM and
>>>> Ford, not Toyota and Nissan.  Think of it that way.  So how do we
>>>> improve by two decades of quality in this "war" against spam?
>>> ----
>>> greylisting is just one of a lot of tools available to the mail server
>>> administrator - all of them are calibrated to minimize the junk mail
>>> delivered to the end users and of course minimizing delivery failures
>>> and false positive scoring by various mechanisms.
>>>
>>> End users of course are the ones ultimately affected and you seemingly
>>> want to open an end user discussion about a server level
>>> technology...please don't as it won't provide clarity to anyone.
>>>
>>> If you are losing e-mails, evaluate the filtering system that you use at
>>> end user level and discuss the methodologies employed by your mail
>>> provider with them.
>>>
>> This is the same sort of nonsense that the carmakers spouted about
>> quality in the 70's.  See where it got them.  
>> This is an end user product.  Clarity is the way the user sees it, not
>> the way the provider sees it.
>>
>> 	I know there is no sense arguing this, I have dealt with engineers and
>> quality issues for years.  The only way that attention comes is when
>> someone provides the user with higher quality and the engineer is
>> provided with a pink slip when his job goes away.
>>
>> 	It is coming.  Wait for it... wait for it....
> ----
> aside from your resurrecting a discussion that is 2 weeks old and
> completely cold...
> 
> aside from your continued insistence to inject user level concerns on a
> topic that was completely about SMTP/MTA administration...
> 
> aside from the fact that you have now tried to render a technical
> discussion on strategic mail handling to a metaphor that has no
> relevance...
> 
> I'd say you have contributed nothing to the discourse at all.
> 
> I will repeat...you are in control over your own e-mail.
> 
> If you don't like how your e-mail provider handles your e-mail, you can
> change providers.
> 
> My comments on this topic were directly solely to a system administrator
> handling a mail account that was job jobbed. How did this concern you? I
> still have no idea.
> 
> Craig
> 

Question. Could not the request for a return receipt solve all of this?

Max