[Mimedefang] Re: On pinheaded ISP's (sort of OT)

[Cam]

>> Tempfailing is also useful for whipping on known spamsites.

first notice the sentence above...

> Sites that allow users to forward will inevitably forward some spam
> along with the rest.  I do not get a good feeling when some site decides to
> tempfail mail they have no intention of ever accepting, and our queues
> rise and service level drops.  Give us a break.  If you don't want it give
> us a 550 and be done with it.


I don't remember every doing this to more than 10 or 12 sites, all of
which fell into 3 groups... 1 set were sites owned by "the spam king"
whatever his name was (i dont' remember off the top of my head right now),
sites that had 127.0.0.1 listed as their MX, and the other were sites that
fall under "outblaze.com".  i intentionally left an open door so that
someone could contact us if they ever got hit by this (think of friendly
fire) and shouldn't have been.  i only received (in about 2 years of doing
this, prior to when i started using MD) 1 request to stop the 471, which i
did.

at one point in time, outblaze grouped spam was responsible for over 70%
of the disk space used across all my mail storage systems.  since most
users didn't check their email from some unkonwn reason, their queues
filled to quotamax.

once i started using MD i had no need for the above method.  but even with
taggng spam and dropping/cleaning viruses, i still had users complaing
(those that actually checked their email) because they had to check the
quarantine on occasion.  they couldn't be bothered to help themselves in
the least little bit.  people i work with now always wondered why i was a
bitter admin when it comes to dealing with users, until i explained how
when given all the nice tools in the world (web frontend to quarantined
messages above threshold A, tagged spam between threshold A and B, ways to
submit messages for better spam/ham detection, all of this was early in
the stages of the game when most of it had to be tied together using
homegrown methods) we still had nothing but grief from over 90% of the
them because they "got too much spam".  they loved our isp in all other
respects though, which is why they stayed with us until we sold it. 
(which is another whole horror story... never sell to E (i won't say it
outloud) unless you have a internet savvy lawyer read the fine print).

my life is great now.. i just manage core services (dns, ntp, etc),
physical servers, and wan equipment.  i only stay subscribed to MD list
because i liked the software and enjoy reading about others horror
stories.  not to mention perl snippets that float across on occasion. 
oh... the one thing that makes my life great above all the other... i
dont' have to deal with users anymore, except on very rare occasion. all
but 2 or 3 of those can actually spell IP and know what it means/does
even.  but the vendors/installers on the other hand...


LOL