Re: [Declude.JunkMail] Should postmaster or abuse accept all e-mail?

[Darin T. Cox]

Title: Message

I would argue that we're not being professional if we respond hastily to another, regardless of what our perceptions of another's comments are.  Professionalism is not just the avoidance of insults, slights, slander, etc., but the decision to not react to another's perceived insults, slights, slander, etc. in a way that could be perceived as argumentative, insulting, etc.  Not to say that I haven't done it myself, but this has been a very clean, well-meaning, generally humble, and helpful group and I would hate to see us get too sidetracked by emotions.   Enough on that...Happy Thanksgiving all!!!   To comment on the issue at hand, I have to say that regardless of the status of a particular network's listing on blacklists, it is our PRIMARY responsibility as mail system administrators or IT infrastructure management to ensure that ALL legitimate email makes it to it's intended destination.  Businesses rely on our keeping them connected in a faster and faster moving economy.  Timely and accurate delivery of their correspondence is a MUST.   SECONDARILY to that, though still mightily important, we should filter out objectionable and/or wasteful UCE/UBE.  I think most of us agree that Declude is a wonderful product with the weighting system to help us achieve that goal.   From what I heard over the few months I've been on the list, Declude coupled with Message Sniffer do an amazing job of identifying UBE/UCE without interfering with non-UBE/UCE mail.  I look forward to implementing Message Sniffer on our systems after the first of the year.   For what it's worth, we've decided to never delete or hold emails for our customers, and instead prepend the message subject with a [SPAM] token for our users to use as they see fit.  Most of our users add a simple rule to their email client to route these messages into a separate folder.  That way they have the messages in case a critical communication they needed was identified as spam, but don't have to deal with a glut of probable spam in their inboxes.   Until we have a new mail protocol that enforces validation rules which make UBE/UCE impractical or impossible, I think that's the best we will be able to do.  Identifying spam is good, but stopping it altogether at the protocol level should be the ultimate goal.  Any other response has little chance of success at dealing with the impact on both individuals AND networks.  There will always be individuals or organizations that will take advantage of any loophole they can find to send out their cheap and flagrant marketing materials.   Just my four cents...two cents for each issue...<grin>   Darin.   ----- Original Message ----- From: Phillip B. Holmes 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 [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.