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

[Sven Willenberger]

On Wed, 2007-01-31 at 11:16 -0600, Jim McCullars wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-01-29 at 14:10 -0700, Philip Prindeville wrote:
> >
> > If they want to know where it originated, then they will have to
> > go through *their* logs and follow the bread-crumb trail
> > back to the point of origin.
> >
> 
>    Here is an example of why that does not give enough information.  AOL
> has a service where I (as email administrator for our domain) can get
> what's called a "Feedback Loop" which basically means that I get email
> whenever an AOL user clicks "This is spam" on email that originates from
> our campus.  Problem is, they strip out all identifying information about
> the subscriber that made the complaint.  Now I can *somtimes* figure out
> enough information from my sendmail logs to see what the problem is, but
> here is something that happens all the time:  Mailing list has 100
> subscribers, 23 of which are AOL addresses.  AOL subscriber decides he
> doesn't want to be on the list any more so rather that unsubscribing, he
> just clicks "This is spam".  I get the Feedback Loop email from AOL.  I
> can see who sent the original email, and the contents of the message, but
> sendmail just shows me that it went to 23 aol.com addresses and I have no
> idea which one complained.  So how do I fix that?  I thought the Feedback
> Loop was a good feature, but all it is is an annoyance because I don't
> have enough information to remedy the complaint.
> 
> Jim McCullars
> University of Alabama in Huntsville
> 
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While the AOL feedback loop can be useful occasionally to track down a
spammer on our end, I find that most of the submissions are completely
unwarranted. I constantly see things like "Hi jim, just lettin you know
betty recovered fine from her operation", or holiday photos, or even
confirmation of orders the aol user placed being reported. There is no
accountibility placed on the AOL users (i.e. a weighting system that
says that what user A reports as spam is generally very much spam while
User B tends to report almost everything as spam regardless of content).
It only becomes an issue when there are enough User B's there to cause
temporary blacklisting of our outbound mailservers . . .

Sven