[sniffer] Rash of false positives
Hi Pete, What's going on over there? We had somewhere between 5 and 10 times the usual number of Sniffer false positives this morning. They are across the board, so it's not just one rule that's catching them, or a particular set of senders or receivers. Hopefully you can get it under control soon. It would also be extremely helpful if you could speed up the false positive processing. Lately it seems to take 2-4 days for the rules to be adjusted, which usually means more of the same are caught and submitted over that time. I believe speeding up that process would result in fewer to process all around. Thanks, Darin.
Re: [sniffer] Rash of false positives
Dear Darin, Thanks for the heads up. It's going to take me about 45 minutes to check the 9000 messages that were blocked by Sniffer last night, but I'll let you know if we experienced the same thing. Michael SteinComputer House www.computerhouse.com - Original Message - From: Darin Cox To: sniffer@SortMonster.com Sent: Tuesday, November 08, 2005 8:45 AM Subject: [sniffer] Rash of false positives Hi Pete, What's going on over there? We had somewhere between 5 and 10 times the usual number of Sniffer false positives this morning. They are across the board, so it's not just one rule that's catching them, or a particular set of senders or receivers. Hopefully you can get it under control soon. It would also be extremely helpful if you could speed up the false positive processing. Lately it seems to take 2-4 days for the rules to be adjusted, which usually means more of the same are caught and submitted over that time. I believe speeding up that process would result in fewer to process all around. Thanks, Darin.
Re: [sniffer] Rash of false positives
We're seeing a continual stream of false positives. It's taking all of our time just to keep up with it at the moment. If something isn't done soon, we're going to have to disable sniffer. Darin. - Original Message - From: Computer House Support To: sniffer@SortMonster.com Sent: Tuesday, November 08, 2005 9:34 AM Subject: Re: [sniffer] Rash of false positives Dear Darin, Thanks for the heads up. It's going to take me about 45 minutes to check the 9000 messages that were blocked by Sniffer last night, but I'll let you know if we experienced the same thing. Michael SteinComputer House www.computerhouse.com - Original Message - From: Darin Cox To: sniffer@SortMonster.com Sent: Tuesday, November 08, 2005 8:45 AM Subject: [sniffer] Rash of false positives Hi Pete, What's going on over there? We had somewhere between 5 and 10 times the usual number of Sniffer false positives this morning. They are across the board, so it's not just one rule that's catching them, or a particular set of senders or receivers. Hopefully you can get it under control soon. It would also be extremely helpful if you could speed up the false positive processing. Lately it seems to take 2-4 days for the rules to be adjusted, which usually means more of the same are caught and submitted over that time. I believe speeding up that process would result in fewer to process all around. Thanks, Darin.
Re: [sniffer] Rash of false positives
After reviewing all the blocked messages for the past 2 days on 2 different servers, I found no false positives. Do you happen to have an old rule base from several days again ? If so, try that to see if it temporarily resolves the false positives. -Original Message-From: "Darin Cox" [EMAIL PROTECTED]To: sniffer@SortMonster.comDate: Tue, 8 Nov 2005 08:45:39 -0500 Subject: [sniffer] Rash of false positives Hi Pete, What's going on over there? We had somewhere between 5 and 10 times the usual number of Sniffer false positives this morning. They are across the board, so it's not just one rule that's catching them, or a particular set of senders or receivers. Hopefully you can get it under control soon. It would also be extremely helpful if you could speed up the false positive processing. Lately it seems to take 2-4 days for the rules to be adjusted, which usually means more of the same are caught and submitted over that time. I believe speeding up that process would result in fewer to process all around. Thanks, Darin.
Re: [sniffer] Rash of false positives
No, we automatically update with every notification of a new rulebase. Looking further, they started just before 5pm ET yesterday. So far, it's about 10 times the usual number of Sniffer false positives. We've sent quite a few this morning to false (at) for processing. Darin. - Original Message - From: Paul Lushinsky To: sniffer@SortMonster.com Sent: Tuesday, November 08, 2005 10:10 AM Subject: Re: [sniffer] Rash of false positives After reviewing all the blocked messages for the past 2 days on 2 different servers, I found no false positives. Do you happen to have an old rule base from several days again ? If so, try that to see if it temporarily resolves the false positives. -Original Message-From: "Darin Cox" [EMAIL PROTECTED]To: sniffer@SortMonster.comDate: Tue, 8 Nov 2005 08:45:39 -0500Subject: [sniffer] Rash of false positives Hi Pete, What's going on over there? We had somewhere between 5 and 10 times the usual number of Sniffer false positives this morning. They are across the board, so it's not just one rule that's catching them, or a particular set of senders or receivers. Hopefully you can get it under control soon. It would also be extremely helpful if you could speed up the false positive processing. Lately it seems to take 2-4 days for the rules to be adjusted, which usually means more of the same are caught and submitted over that time. I believe speeding up that process would result in fewer to process all around. Thanks, Darin.
Re: [sniffer] Rash of false positives
I don't know if I would call it a rash, but over the last week, I've submitted about 30 false positives. That's far more than average. I've developed a feeling that Message Sniffer has become "too tight". - Original Message - From: Darin Cox To: sniffer@SortMonster.com Sent: Tuesday, November 08, 2005 8:54 AM Subject: Re: [sniffer] Rash of false positives We're seeing a continual stream of false positives. It's taking all of our time just to keep up with it at the moment. If something isn't done soon, we're going to have to disable sniffer. Darin. - Original Message - From: Computer House Support To: sniffer@SortMonster.com Sent: Tuesday, November 08, 2005 9:34 AM Subject: Re: [sniffer] Rash of false positives Dear Darin, Thanks for the heads up. It's going to take me about 45 minutes to check the 9000 messages that were blocked by Sniffer last night, but I'll let you know if we experienced the same thing. Michael SteinComputer House www.computerhouse.com - Original Message - From: Darin Cox To: sniffer@SortMonster.com Sent: Tuesday, November 08, 2005 8:45 AM Subject: [sniffer] Rash of false positives Hi Pete, What's going on over there? We had somewhere between 5 and 10 times the usual number of Sniffer false positives this morning. They are across the board, so it's not just one rule that's catching them, or a particular set of senders or receivers. Hopefully you can get it under control soon. It would also be extremely helpful if you could speed up the false positive processing. Lately it seems to take 2-4 days for the rules to be adjusted, which usually means more of the same are caught and submitted over that time. I believe speeding up that process would result in fewer to process all around. Thanks, Darin.
Re: [sniffer] Rash of false positives
I've submitted about 45 so far this morning. I normally submit at most a half dozen each morning. Darin. - Original Message - From: Darrell ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: sniffer@SortMonster.com Sent: Tuesday, November 08, 2005 10:19 AM Subject: Re: [sniffer] Rash of false positives I too have had to submit a lot more false positives lately. I also second that false positive processing seems to be a lot slower than previously. Darrell Check out http://www.invariantsystems.com for utilities for Declude, mxGuard, And Imail. IMail/Declude Overflow Queue Monitoring, SURBL/URI integration, MRTG Integration, and Log Parsers. Scott Fisher writes: I don't know if I would call it a rash, but over the last week, I've submitted about 30 false positives. That's far more than average. I've developed a feeling that Message Sniffer has become too tight. - Original Message - From: Darin Cox To: sniffer@SortMonster.com Sent: Tuesday, November 08, 2005 8:54 AM Subject: Re: [sniffer] Rash of false positives We're seeing a continual stream of false positives. It's taking all of our time just to keep up with it at the moment. If something isn't done soon, we're going to have to disable sniffer. Darin. - Original Message - From: Computer House Support To: sniffer@SortMonster.com Sent: Tuesday, November 08, 2005 9:34 AM Subject: Re: [sniffer] Rash of false positives Dear Darin, Thanks for the heads up. It's going to take me about 45 minutes to check the 9000 messages that were blocked by Sniffer last night, but I'll let you know if we experienced the same thing. Michael Stein Computer House www.computerhouse.com - Original Message - From: Darin Cox To: sniffer@SortMonster.com Sent: Tuesday, November 08, 2005 8:45 AM Subject: [sniffer] Rash of false positives Hi Pete, What's going on over there? We had somewhere between 5 and 10 times the usual number of Sniffer false positives this morning. They are across the board, so it's not just one rule that's catching them, or a particular set of senders or receivers. Hopefully you can get it under control soon. It would also be extremely helpful if you could speed up the false positive processing. Lately it seems to take 2-4 days for the rules to be adjusted, which usually means more of the same are caught and submitted over that time. I believe speeding up that process would result in fewer to process all around. Thanks, Darin. This E-Mail came from the Message Sniffer mailing list. For information and (un)subscription instructions go to http://www.sortmonster.com/MessageSniffer/Help/Help.html This E-Mail came from the Message Sniffer mailing list. For information and (un)subscription instructions go to http://www.sortmonster.com/MessageSniffer/Help/Help.html
Re: [sniffer] Rash of false positives
Hi Pete, The rash of false positivesseems to have stopped with the last sniffer rulebase update at 10am ET. It had started with a rulebase update at 4:30pm ET yesterday, and continued through the updates at 8:40pm, 12am, 3am, and 6:20am today. I'd still like to know what happened, and how we can avoid it in the future. Thanks, Darin. - Original Message - From: Darin Cox To: sniffer@SortMonster.com Sent: Tuesday, November 08, 2005 8:45 AM Subject: [sniffer] Rash of false positives Hi Pete, What's going on over there? We had somewhere between 5 and 10 times the usual number of Sniffer false positives this morning. They are across the board, so it's not just one rule that's catching them, or a particular set of senders or receivers. Hopefully you can get it under control soon. It would also be extremely helpful if you could speed up the false positive processing. Lately it seems to take 2-4 days for the rules to be adjusted, which usually means more of the same are caught and submitted over that time. I believe speeding up that process would result in fewer to process all around. Thanks, Darin.
Re[2]: [sniffer] Rash of false positives
On Tuesday, November 8, 2005, 11:02:09 AM, Darin wrote: Hi Pete, The rash of false positives seems to have stopped with the last sniffer rulebase update at 10am ET. It had started with a rulebase update at 4:30pm ET yesterday, and continued through the updates at 8:40pm, 12am, 3am, and 6:20am today. I'd still like to know what happened, and how we can avoid it in the future. I've been bound up in some performance tuning today so I've not had a chance to follow this thread until now. When I first looked in on it I scanned the false positive submissions and almost none of them matched any active rules. I know that a couple of rules were pulled out after review last night late .. they had been picked up by some FPs in SURBL others that matched up with spamtrap submissions. It's possible that these are what you experienced. I won't know unless you can give me some log entries to go with those messages since those entries will tell me the rule IDs. As for having it happen again - that's very unlikely since ever time we pull a rule out due to FPs or potential FPs (the rules that were pulled had not caused any FPs yet but were expected to... one was rr.com IIRC, it was pulled only a couple hours after it's creation). A lot of things have to go wrong to cause an FP problem like you are reporting. Please look up our rule-panic procedure which is designed to mitigate these problems immediately for you if they happen: http://www.sortmonster.com/MessageSniffer/Help/FalsePositivesHelp.html#RulePanic We can't guarantee that rule-panics won't happen, but we can make them exceedingly rare and non-repeatable. I will be processing your FP submissions shortly. Hope this helps, _M This E-Mail came from the Message Sniffer mailing list. For information and (un)subscription instructions go to http://www.sortmonster.com/MessageSniffer/Help/Help.html
Re[4]: [sniffer] Rash of false positives
On Tuesday, November 8, 2005, 3:25:20 PM, Darin wrote: Hi Pete, There was a consistent stream of false positives over the mentioned time period, not just a blast at a particular time. They suddenly started at 5pm (shortly after a 4:30pm rulesbase update), and were fairly evenly spread from 5pm - 11pm and 6am - 10am today (not many legitimate emails came in between 11pm and 6am)...spanning 4 other rulebase updates at 8:40pm, 12am, 3am, and 6:20am. There were a number of different rules involved, and over 45 false positives in that time period. This is highly unusual -- I didn't remove many rules, and normally only one or two would be responsible. If you found that a large number of rules were responsible then something else happend and we need to look at that... I'd need to see your SNF logs from that period since the changes (removals anyway) in the rulebase were very small and unrelated - that just doesn't line up with your description. One thing does-- in the past if snf2check was not used to check a new download then a corrupted rulebase could cause SNF to produce erratic results... since snf2check has been in place we have not seen this. Is it possible that a bad rulebase file got pressed into service on your system? -- probably a look at the logs would help there too since this kind of failure is accompanied by very specific oddities in the logs. Hope this helps, _M This E-Mail came from the Message Sniffer mailing list. For information and (un)subscription instructions go to http://www.sortmonster.com/MessageSniffer/Help/Help.html
