[Mimedefang] Re: Great open letter about anti-virus, emails, bounces, etc.

[Sevo Stille]

Michael Sims wrote:

> ...to go away and use their ISP's mail relay to send their mail.  I'm afraid
> if I do this that I'll run across some fly-by-night company that's too cheap
> to get a decent hosting solution and is trying to run a business off a
> residential dynamic connection.  And it'll be my luck that this will be a
> client that one of my end users will swear they need to do business with.

Well, the issue is: Why would you want to restrict anybody from running 
his own mail server? Presumably not because you resent people running 
their own mail server and think major corporations relays the smartest 
thing since potato chips, but rather because they are often associated 
with malware and spam.

The implication is that while filtering for non-corporate-owned mail 
servers may have the side effect of filtering a considerable amount of 
malware and spam, you aren't really tackling malware and spam. As 
mimedefang/SA/clamd will recognize beyond 95% of all spam and 100% of 
all malware we receive, I do not really think that filtering rules that 
attack phenomena which in spite of some statistic relation are 
politically wholly independent of spam and malware are the right way to 
go. I'd rather improve on spam detection than prohibit behaviour which 
is per se legitimate - and which, going by recent news from the UK, may 
even be desirable in some places.

Sevo

-- 
Sevo Stille
sevo at radiox.de