There are two rather widely separated camps regarding handling of unwanted email (UBE) and unsolicited commercial email (UCE) One side willingly provides the connectivity and resources to accept all spam, choosing only to flag it and deliver as usual. The other does not wish to allow spammers ingress to their systems, to the extent possible, and this camp chooses to block all UCE/UBE at the border, even at the small risk of turning away what some may call legitimate email. Each side presents strong arguments in favor of their positions, but should never denigrate those who do not agree and take the opposite position.
In either camp, there are no settings that should be considered "set it and forget it" and attention must be constant and regular in tweaking the settings. No single solution that is reactive will ever be a perfect one, Spammers spend a lot of money staying up with technology, and improved methods for getting by whatever solution you impose in your individual case. Spamcop, for instance, does not blacklist your server on the basis of one complaint, and provide contact information should you be reported as a spammer in error. They have been quite proactive, in my experience, in rectifying erroneous reports. On the other hand if you direct bulk email to their designated spam trap addresses, you may expect to be blacklisted immediately, and in my opinion deservedly so. As a part of our system, we have scripting that will permanently blacklist your mail server after the receipt of 5 obviously spam emails, or two virus infected emails. Our reasoning is that the originator of such email is not responsible enough to be allowed ingress to our servers, which serve over 1300 domains. This part of our policy is clearly explained to our subscribers. Our customers do not wish Viagra, Cialis, Casino, or mortgage scam email to appear in their customers' inboxes or other folders. This junk mail makes up over 50% of all email attempting to deliver to our gateway. The blacklisted ISP cannot petition us for removal, because we will likewise ignore them as well. Open relay and dynamic sources are treated likewise. We cannot be expected to assume liability for compromised or misconfigured servers. Does this sound harsh? Of course it does, but we refer the complaints right back to their own irresponsible server operators where the responsibility should rightfully lie. Your mileage may vary, we are satisfied with our approach. ====================================== Our Anti-spam solution works!! http://www.clickdoug.com/mailfilter.cfm For hosting solutions http://www.clickdoug.com http://www.forta.com/cf/isp/isp.cfm?isp_id=1069 ====================================== ----- Original Message ----- From: "Panda Consulting S.A. Luis Alberto Arango" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, July 30, 2004 3:40 PM Subject: RE: [IMail Forum] Convert this to English please? : My two cents. Your best defense is that ServePath is quite irresponsible : using SpamCop in a Production Environment if they haven't warned their users : about the pro and cons of using SpamCop. Bottom line, it affects legitimate : email from reaching the user. : : To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/
