The commercial RBL's let spam through also. As to whether they let as much spam through as, say, spamcops RBL, I'll let others argue that point. But that is NOT the issue I raised in the beginning. The issue is this automatic assumption that companies like Gmail and Hotmail/MSN/Live/Microsoft/365/whatever-the-name-o-the-week-they-call-themselves all have SIGNIFICANTLY BETTER spam filtering than Spamassassin+free/public RBLs+some judicious blacklists. This assumption is apparently based on the notion bigger is better, not the notion that it's not the size of the wand but the magic in it.This is a perception I'm seeing some responders to this thread echo! I have to ask you if you think those guys are better why are you even using Spamassassin at all? Just throw in the towel and find something else to do, you don't even have faith in your own mailserver. Your a farmer. You have a bunch of cows. 3 of those cows are convinced the grass in the neighbor farmer's field is greener so every time you let them out to pasture they go running over there and bust down the barbed wire fence and then the rest of the herd follows them over.
I believe, personally, using your cow and farmer metaphor would include your farm being limited and your fields and operation being smaller, while the cows look at a major farming operation across the way with hundreds of people seemingly do really green and wonderful things with grass, regardless of the fact that grass is just grass.
I would never equate my SPAM filtering capabilities to the army of monkeys at Google that do it, regardless of my internal configurations and the amount of filters or RBL's that I use with success. I simply cannot compare to a large, dedicated team at a major corporation.
This has nothing to do with faith or my abilities. It simply has to do with manpower and available resources.
Regardless of how robust, secure, and tasty my grass is, I simply can't grow and maintain the same amount they can. It's just facts.
Hopefully you commune with your cows and you help them to realize that having the ability to get one-on-one time with the farmer and having response times for loading the trough are significantly faster than the robots across the way throwing feed wildly in each direction.
Or you just turn the 3 into hamburger.
You and your neighbor farmer do the same damn thing to your fields, and both of you agree the grass is exactly the same but you just can't get these 3 dumb cows to see logic. What do you do? Ted PS - contracting to the farmer down the street to manage your cows AIN'T an answer!!! What is HE going to do about the cows? On 7/29/2014 11:13 AM, Asai wrote:My question regarding all of this interesting topic is, isn't there some kind of RBL or something which can be subscribed to for a nominal fee per year that can aid the small IT shop in maintaining spam filters? --Asai On 7/28/14 9:10 AM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:Hi All, Just lost another one, dammit. Small company with about 6 mailboxes who some consultant gave them a song and dance about how Gmail's such a better mail service since "they don't get any spam" No it's not going to break us. But this is what I see happening. SpamAssassin for us filters probably about 80% of the spam out of the box, doing nothing other than using defaults. If the users feed the learner, it's even better. But, the spam is coming in at such a tremendously high volume now that when a user account gets 5,000 pieces of mail a day, all of it except for maybe 5 pieces of mail are NOT spam, even at 99% effectiveness, the user is STILL getting 50 pieces of spam in a day that SpamAssassin misses, compared to their 5 pieces of ham mail. they don't see the 4,950 pieces of mail we deleted for them. They just see the 50 pieces that got past, compared to their 5 legitimate pieces. So naturally the users figure we are rat bastards who aren't doing a good job filtering. So they setup a test account at Google and "try it out for a month" Of course, the account gets very little spam. Why would it otherwise? It's brand new. It hasn't had a chance to be disseminated to all of the mailing lists, the websites, the other coorespondents's computers of theirs that get hit by harvesting viruses. Their ignorance then reinforces their invalid perception and then they figure we are liars. So they move their domain. A year later, when Gmail is doing the same thing to them, they finally figure out it's not the provider, its the spammers and oh boy maybe we weren't lying after all. But, it's a lot of work to shift back to us, so why bother if all the mail services are the same way? So they are gone, permanently, never to return. We have tried educating them. But spamfighting today is complex. If you explain it completely and they understand the explanation and believe you, they give up hope because they realize that just hitting the delete button on those 50 pieces of spam is easier than shifting their poor email behaviors that got them into the mess in the first place. But then a month later the complex explanation is forgotten and they are once more vulnerable to any snake oil sales consultant selling them gmail. But most of them don't understand anyway. And if you just try to dumb down the explanation it starts making no sense at all very quickly. What do other people do? Or are we just going to end up with an Internet in about 10 years where every single email box is either on Microsoft 365 or Gmail and the NSA has a wonderful interface to use to hunt through whatever they want without bothering with a warrant? And to add insult to injury - this small company is a dental office - subject to HIPAA - and Gmail is not (and has stated they will not) be HIPAA complaint. We are! Ted --- This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active. http://www.avast.com--- This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active. http://www.avast.com
-- .==== === -- - -- - - - - - ---. | Nate Metheny IT Group Leader | | Santa Fe Institute office 505.946.2730 | | cell 505.930.9390 fax 505.982.0565 | | http://www.santafe.edu n...@santafe.edu | `--- - -- - - -- - = == ==='
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