At 9/3/03 8:31 AM, George Kirikos wrote: >I'd rather pay a premium, as one can't afford to be without email in >this day and age, nor allow one's email to be shut off merely due to >one false complaint.
Unfortunately, your e-mail is even more likely to be interrupted if your ISP does not have a suspend-on-sight policy (or something close to it). In my experience as one of the people reading abuse@ for thousands of domains, getting information from the people accused of spamming is like pulling teeth; they lie, obfuscate, ignore requests, etc. If I didn't have the stick of suspending their account, it would take weeks to resolve a spam complaint, and the risk of tens of thousands of mailboxes being blacklisted due to the delay would be high. In contrast, the "suspend on sight" policy only breaks the mail for a single customer if it's a false complaint (and honestly, false complaints are pretty rare). All in all, our strict anti-spam policy has given much higher mail uptime per customer than the lack of such a policy would have given. >If somebody called the building manager of the Empire State Building >and said "there's asbestos in the ceiling tiles", would they >immediately shut down the entire building, disrupting all the busineses >there, and then investigate it afterwards?? No, but that's not really a valid analogy because the problem doesn't get much worse if ignored for a few hours. The implication of a spam complaint is that there is some immediate problem that needs to be resolved to prevent further harm. For example, if someone called in a report of a fire in the Empire State Building, the management would certainly shut it down and disrupt business, even before the fire was confirmed. Many will say that a fire in a building is not like a spam complaint. However, the people who operate some blacklists will disagree, and the server will be blacklisted anyway. >If you have a lot of hosting clients, I suppose you don't know them all >personally, and thus can't know for sure whether the complaint is valid >ex ante. However, if one has a small operation, you'd know the clients >personally, and can vouch for their good behaviour, and give the client >the benefit of the doubt, investigating before pulling the plug. In >essense, they'd be on a "white list". Right. The ultimate example is a dedicated server where you won't be blacklisted for the actions of other users (and perhaps that's what you meant by paying a premium). That can minimize the problem, but still won't completely solve it (your entire upstream ISP could be blacklisted as a result of a lax anti-spam policy). >So, is there a way to be on Tucows/OpenSRS outsourced email white list, >if such a thing exists? I'd be willing to pay a premium, or pay >penalties should any spam complaint be valid AFTER investigation, as >long as the email is kept up and running. This almost sounds like an ad for "bulletproof e-mail sending" :-) I can almost guarantee that you'd have less reliable e-mail using such a service, because it would be a magnet for spammers and therefore routinely blacklisted. Hell, I'd blacklist it. It would have exactly the opposite effect of what you want. Yes, that's unfair to people who aren't spammers. Unfortunately, that's the lesser-of-two-evils situation the Internet is in. -- Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies
