>Well, the first thing that is ironic is that you are blocking mail from >Ipswitch. <BG>
I know - i just never bothered to put ipswitch in a whitelist because i never thought they would get blacklisted ;-)
As you can see, anyone can make it into a single blacklist. Just about every spam database has had at least one false positive, and just about every legitimate mailserver has made it into at least one spam database at one time or another.
>We *strongly* urge our customers (and non-customers, too!) >never to block E-mail based on the result of a single spam test. Way too >many false positives for most people; even if you can accept the false >positives,
Given the number of emails we recive on a daily basis (600) and the number of emails that trapped either by imgate or imail (about 140) i dont have to many issues blocking on single test.
You've fallen for Len's statistics. :)
You receive 600 E-mails a day and trap 140. But what if 40 of those 140 are non-spams?
since i have been using RBL's i've had less than a dozen false positives.
That you know of. :)
> you then ethically must alert people that you solicit E-mail >from what your policies are.
Looked up Ethical in the BOFH dictionary, but couldn't find a match ;-)
Well, let me tell you this. On a typical day I may help out a dozen or so people (not customers of Computerized Horizons) for free with all sorts of computer related problems. About once a week, I get a response to my response, saying "I'm not going to bother reading your E-mail unless you go to this web site, squint your eyes, and type in what you see." That's very annoying -- I don't bother replying to those (after already having been spammed by one company after doing so!). Then, there are the once-a-week "User unknown" bounces -- nothing more annoying than that. First, I have to check to make sure it wasn't an IMail error (come on Ipswitch, time to fix the using-A-record-when-MX-exists bug 100%). Then, I have to check to see if we were blocked for some dumb reason (there hasn't been a good reason yet). If so, I rarely bother responding. Why? Because often even if I re-route the E-mail through another route, that route will be blocked, too. The way I look at it, if someone is dumb enough to block a company like ours, they are very likely going to be blocking other routes that we can send the E-mail.
So what happens? My time has been wasted, as has yours. You probably think I didn't bother responding, so you get a bad impression of me. But the big problem occurs when too many people start doing this ("critical mass"). At that point, I say "screw this" and walk away, no longer offering free advice. I benefit by getting more free time, but the Internet as a whole loses out.
If you don't think the Internet as a whole would lose out (some people don't), that's OK -- you can just picture the same scenario with someone else that offers free advice.
-Scott
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