[Mimedefang] Including archetypal filters to include in release?

[Philip Prindeville]

Joseph Brennan wrote:

> We score for bad $Helo and sometimes we reject when a message has other
> spammy features.  Whenever I get a report of this, it always turns out
> to be some small-scale operation like a club, a church, a museum, one
> guy sending newsletters, etc.  Why?  I suppose because larger places
> have enough IT staff that some one of them knows how to get this right.
> I end up talking with people who half the time don't know what HELO is
> or how to configure it.  The other half get it fixed but act as if we
> are the only place they send mail to that ever cared, which is probably
> the case.


I'm still not entirely clear here.

So, are you saying that they haven't configured their system correct?  
Or that they
have a system where the software takes the correct global configuration 
state, and
munges it into uselessness (which I've seen a lot of... i.e. Outlook 
using just the
host-portion of the FQDN).

I don't believe in inconveniencing people.

But I don't believe in bending over backwards to add workarounds and 
kludges to
allow people to limp along in the face of broken software.

When I was at Cisco, we cluttered the code a lot with workarounds for 
stuff that
MSFT did...  And even though Cisco had 30,000 seats (or more) for 
Windows, you'd
think that they would have just held MSFT's feet to the fire and gotten 
then to fix it
anyway (i.e. leveraging their being a user and licensee of MSFT 
software, as opposed
to a network equipment vendor that had to interoperate with the 500 lb 
gorilla... to mash
metaphors... ;-).

It might be something as simple as a lot of ISP's not providing the 
correct hostname
in their DHCP state which they push to their customer...  Or it might be 
some popular
software, like Thunderbird, not doing the right thing. (Which 
incidentally, is being worked
on... see Mozilla bug 279525...)

-Philip