[Modus] Anti-Spam company

[David Thake]

Title: Message

There may be privacy issues in these ideas. Not all false positives are simple unimportant emails.   David Thake General Manager Keyworld Ltd UB 42 Industrial Zone San Gwann SGN 09 Malta Tel: +356 25402540 Fax: +356 25409999 http://www.keyworld.net OneVoice low cost International Voice Calls. Now phoning the World doesn't have to cost the Earth.     From: Phil Hart [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2003 5:35 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Modus] Anti-Spam company Agreed, i've requested this feature for a long long time.  releasing a false postivie should forward it somewhere, be it to vircom or to an admin specified email address so we can send it to vircom   Phil Hart www.vance.net   -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mako Internet Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2003 11:18 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Modus] Anti-Spam company Maybe to get the better feedback, the release.asp page customer go to, to get their messages from quarantine should have another option.  Right now it says:   In order to prevent future messages from this recipient to be considered as spam, we suggest you add this sender e-mail address to your whitelist. Click here to add [EMAIL PROTECTED] to your whitelist.    Maybe there should be another link that says something like to prevent messages like this getting caught in the quarantine click here   This would send the email in question to vircom, as if the message was sent right from the console as a false positive ----- Original Message ----- From: Jon Benson To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, December 09, 2003 9:12 PM Subject: [Modus] Anti-Spam company I totally agree.  Everything I have seen blocked would look like SPAM if you didn't know better.   The only way I could see things being improved is to take in to account a reputation of the sending IP like the Ironport does with it's Senderbase system.  If the reputation is high enough, don't pass it via the filters.  That would stop newsletters from various companies ending up as false positives.  I've seen email from Dell, companies supplying third party services to businesses (messaging via email), etc all with false positives that such a system would avoid.   Jon Benson Mail/DNS/Linux Administrator OzHosting.com -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]On Behalf Of Cary Fitch Sent: Wednesday, 10 December 2003 4:07 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Modus] Anti-Spam company We are all thrilled with the catch rate.  Obviously there are some false positives.   I get a false postive if I send nothing but a URL in an e-mail message.   That is a very likely spam technique though.   So, the (unfortunate) answer is to white list those corresponents who you either trust with your life :-) or who you would expect to send you all sorts of stuff.   It is unlikely that a stranger would send you just a URL except as spam.   The reader has to let the software do its best, then correct/exempt messages from the people he trusts.  That or have a "mail taster" to read all the mail for him.   Cary Fitch     ----- Original Message ----- From: Jon Benson To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, December 09, 2003 10:23 PM Subject: [Modus] Anti-Spam company We have 12k domains (82k mailboxes) and we recently enabled Anti-Spam globally at the Normal level.  We are seeing a number of false positives, mostly forms coming from the customers own website not getting through or newsletters, but so far the number of customers to complain has been fairly limited.  Perhaps 50 domains total, though one reseller (with over 100 domains) wants it disabled for all his services.   False positives are obviously the #1 problem now with the SCA engine which seems to be just as aggressive on Normal as it is on Extreme.  Unforunately it's going to be hard to get it down lower, especially without the false positives being reported.   So far I've managed to report only one myself.  :(   Unfortunately I suspect the stats Vircom have on false positives are skewed due to the large number of them that go unnoticed and/or unreported.   Jon Benson Mail/DNS/Linux Administrator OzHosting.com -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]On Behalf Of Benjamin S. Rogers Sent: Wednesday, 10 December 2003 12:50 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Modus] Anti-Spam company We’re having a lot of problems with false positives since upgrading to ModusMail 3. In fact, I’d say a substantial number of customers have asked us to disable spam filtering on their accounts since the upgrade. Though I don’t have a specific percentage, I’d guess that around 10% of our customers with spam filtering enabled have asked us to disable it. I feel this is a substantial number as we do not enable spam filtering by default on our customers’ accounts. In other words, these were customers that asked us to enable it for them at some point in the past.   I mention this not to start a debate but because I feel we must be doing something different then the rest of you. When customers ask for spam filtering, we set them at strong. Back on ModusMail 1.4, we had all of the extreme scripts enabled because, even at extreme, we had remarkably few false positives. When we upgraded to version 3, we figured that, at strong, if they complain about false positives, we could clock them down to normal. If they complain that spam is still getting through, we can push them up to extreme. We have room either way.   Nevertheless, false positives have been a real problem for us. There are several types of false positives which are clearly identifiable. These include dating service correspondences, real estate notifications, stock market trade notifications, airline rewards and discount e-mails, monthly banking statements, etc. These are all obviously automated mailings and probably very difficult to differentiate from spam. Nevertheless, in each of these cases, customers have specifically signed up for the messages and the messages are personalized in some way or another for them. They are certainly not spam, and our customers definitely want them.   The worst, however, is the false positives on personal correspondences. We’ve had a fair number of these reported to our staff. In fact, we run spam filtering on our staff addresses and have experienced false positives on personal correspondences ourselves. Unfortunately, most of these tend to be after fact. In other words, we can’t afford to keep mail around in the quarantine long enough to report much of these false positives – provided that the customer even agrees to let us report it in the first place.   It’s a difficult subject to address. Most of the false positives are of a personal nature and not something that we can report to Vircom. We’ve had a fair amount of success white listing banks, online trading companies, dating services and such, but this doesn’t really solve the problem: Vircom cannot improve their spam filtering without feedback, and we can’t provide feedback without permission from the customer.   So, I guess I’m asking, what are the rest of you doing? Does the “normal” setting produce substantially less false positives? Is that what everyone else is using? Or does everyone else consider bulk e-mail, even personalized bulk e-mail from one’s bank or realtor or investment company or whatever, to be spam?   I guess I don’t understand how people can claim 98% catch rate and less than a .1% false positive rate. At strong, we’re seeing a very good catch rate – maybe even as high as 98% on some accounts. However, we’re seeing a much higher false positive rate. More importantly, we’re receiving a lot of flack from our customers.   Ben Rogers http://www.c4.net v.508.240.0051 f.508.240.0057   -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Phil Hart Sent: Tuesday, December 09, 2003 5:44 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Modus] Anti-Spam company   Same experience here, company called spam squelcher or something like that.  they had a hardware based product that would sit just behind our router.  it would scan traffic and block certian ips and stuff like that.  wanted a ton of money for it.  i suggested he take a look at modusmail, told him we no longer had a spam problem at all, false positives were extremely low all that stuff.  I should of tried to sell him Modusmail so i could get a referral! ;)   Phil Hart www.vance.net -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mako Internet Sent: Tuesday, December 09, 2003 5:17 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Modus] Anti-Spam company I just had a company call me up trying to sell me anti-spam server software, I told them I had one already in which I was already pleased.  the man on the line was intriged and started to ask questions.  I told him I was seeing catch rates for my boxes at 98%+ (alot of mine are more like 99.9%) so he asked about false positives I said I see less than .1%.  Next he asked about price and how many users we had, he was so floored by everything I had compared to what he was selling he was speachless, finally he said I am sorry I can not help you and promptly hungup.  The last word I heard was wow.  Just thought I would share this funny experience with you.