Thanks Todd, I understand your point. I don't use my own blacklists, I use the ORDB, spamcop etc. I don't use the filters, just the organizations that actually investigate the mailers by running diagnostics for open relays, etc.,. You have to really screw up to not get mail through to us. I appreciate your opinion.
Regards, Phillip B. Holmes Media Resolutions Inc. Macromedia Alliance Partner http://www.mediares.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] 1-888-395-4678 ext. 101 972-889-0201 ext. 101 /* Please send support requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] */ Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up.--- Chinese Proverb -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Todd Ryan Sent: Saturday, November 30, 2002 7:48 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Declude.JunkMail] Should postmaster or abuse accept all e-mail? Phillip, I see one flaw in this logic. It seems that you are assuming that all mail admins are "good mail admins" as you say in the last paragraph. In my experience, not very many of them are. And probably all the good ones are on this list! ;-) The typical scenerio I've seen is that for one reason or another, an ISP will get blacklisted. Sometimes because they host multiple smaller companies and one did something stupid and got blacklisted. Sometimes because they don't know what they're doing and screw up their config in one way or another and don't realize it (schools, government, etc). Either way, if one of their servers has reached our "bounce" threshhold, I bounce a message back to the user INVITING them to forward it to my postmaster@ account so we can review it. postmaster@ and abuse@ have gotten no more than 5 spam messages in 2 years (and I'm not sure why) so I gladly whitelist them. Letting the occasional end user respond to abuse@ or postmaster@ inquiring into why their mail was blocked is not a burden on resources. OK...here's my philosophy which is quite different than yours: I am offering a service to people. Not ISPs and mail admins. If someone gets one of my bounce messages due to the filters I've built, I feel that it is my job to let them know it was not delivered and to give them a way to have it investigated. This works very well. On the rare occasion that I bounced a message from a real person, I was able to either alert the "good" mail admin and they resolved the problem or in the case where of a "bad" mail admin that had no abuse@ or postmaster@, I whitelisted that particular sender address so they could get their mail through. And in one or two cases, it made me aware of flaws in my filters. We can argue all day long about how things "should" be...how all mail administrators "should" monitor their logs, "should" check their configurations, "should" be aware of any blacklists they're on,etc. But we all know that most (and mostly bigger) ISPs don't do this or can't do this. And since we get paid by the users of our services, it only takes a few AOL users to call users on our system and say "Hey...all the mail I'm sending you bounces...you should change ISPs" to give your business a bad name. It's all about keeping the users happy. I know we look at our businesses from different points of view so I won't discuss it further. Just thought this might help you understand why a lot of people on this list disagree with your approach. Thanks for listening. --Todd. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Phillip B. Holmes" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, November 28, 2002 2:17 PM Subject: RE: [Declude.JunkMail] Should postmaster or abuse accept all e-mail? > John, > > Why don't you keep this on a professional level and keep your snide > little comments to yourself? > > I manage 4 ISP's John with revenues over 5 million a year. Declude is a > godsend to us as some over our clients have been receiving over 200 spam > emails a day to a single POP account. If you are blacklisted, you are > there for a reason. Either your server allows relay or you are not RFC > compliant. Either way, in 99% of the cases, the mail server > implementation is broken and should not be running in production. Trust > me when I say that they find out VERY quickly that they can't send mail > to half the world when they are violating spam AUPs. It is not my > responsibility to baby sit those people or tell them how to run their > mail servers. They will have to learn the hard way that spam is > unacceptable and won't be tolerated on most networks. > > Spam is a huge issue that costs ISPs millions in man-hours and > bandwidth. We do not tolerate blacklisted SMTP servers, period. And > yes... I would love to have the revenues of AOL, RoadRunner, SBC or > PacBell. They all delete blacklisted mail and report the issue back to > the sending ISPs via logging (which is totally acceptable). A good email > admin would simply need to investigate his logs to find out why their > mail is rejected around half the planet. If more ISPs took a hard line > on spam, there would not be the huge problem that it is today. > > Regards, > > Phillip B. Holmes > Media Resolutions Inc. > Macromedia Alliance Partner > <http://www.mediares.com> http://www.mediares.com > [EMAIL PROTECTED] 1-888-395-4678 ext. 101 > 972-889-0201 ext. 101 > > /* Please send support requests to > [EMAIL PROTECTED] */ > > Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up.--- Chinese Proverb > > > > > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of John Tolmachoff > Sent: Thursday, November 28, 2002 12:43 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: RE: [Declude.JunkMail] Should postmaster or abuse accept all > e-mail? > > > >If you have earned a place on the blacklists, you wont be sending mail > to my networks. > > Oh wait, I get it, he wants to be AOL. > > John Tolmachoff MCSE, CSSA > IT Manager, Network Engineer > RelianceSoft, Inc. > Fullerton, CA 92835 > www.reliancesoft.com > > > > --- > [This E-mail was scanned for viruses by Declude Virus > (http://www.declude.com)] > > --- > This E-mail came from the Declude.JunkMail mailing list. To > unsubscribe, just send an E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], and type > "unsubscribe Declude.JunkMail". The archives can be found at > http://www.mail-archive.com. > > > > --- [This E-mail was scanned for viruses by Declude Virus (http://www.declude.com)] --- This E-mail came from the Declude.JunkMail mailing list. To unsubscribe, just send an E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], and type "unsubscribe Declude.JunkMail". The archives can be found at http://www.mail-archive.com. --- [This E-mail was scanned for viruses by Declude Virus (http://www.declude.com)] --- This E-mail came from the Declude.JunkMail mailing list. To unsubscribe, just send an E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], and type "unsubscribe Declude.JunkMail". The archives can be found at http://www.mail-archive.com.
