>I have some domains that are worried about false positives. I am
>sending all rejects to an email that I monitor. I also wanted to know
>if senders get a "reject" message back to let them know that their mail
>didn't go through.
You can see in the session transcript messages that the senders get a 4xx
or 5xx error msg. If their return path is valid and their MTA is working,
they will see the reject in a short a time as 1 minute.
>How does everyone handle this?
False positives are generally a tiny, but sometimes persistent pb, esp
after you implement a new filter technique, like the recent SAV.
If your clients are worried about false positives from known senders, then
have them tell you what domains those are so you can whitelist the sending
ip's.
If your clients are worried about false positives from unknown senders,
then it's hard to impossible to eliminate false positives. But the problem
is manageable and acceptable if your clients appreciate your spam-stopping
efforts, the nature of false positives, and how quick and easy it is to
whitelist.
You could send them a (necessarily frequent) report of all rejects by
domain showing from/to, but I guess that would drive them nutz, and then
you nutz, as they start questioning every damn reject as maybe false and
asking you to whitelist it so they can see, and then "ah, no, that's crap
please unwhitelist it". The anxiety and aggro would be intolerable for
healthy people.
So, if they want filtering, give it to them and on your terms ("some itty
bitty amount of false positives always exist, but we can whitelist quickly
and easily".)
If they're nervous about false positives, then let everything through to
their domains so the nuttiness is confined to them, and you can do your job.
Anything in between gets real hard to manage real quick.
btw, that's just the way IMGate works. There are quite a few other
viciously defended mail-abuse management approaches (including, in all
seriousness, "dump everything on the user" and "spam costs nothing, why
block it?") that could be more suitable to your clients.
Len
