Comments on: Gmail and Anti-Spam

By: etbe

etbe — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 04:48:31 +0000

Sven: I don’t use the whois list because last time I checked it listed all of Australia.

Helmut: Currently more than half the email that arrives in my inbox is spam. So the communication problem is related to my filters not being strict enough if anything. There is no law against incompetence (otherwise most of the population would be locked up) and there is no law against declining email during the SMTP protocol. So it’s not an issue of punishing illegal actions with illegal actions, it’s more an issue of shunning incompetent people who do annoying things and get in the way.

Russ: I once worked for an ISP that had two employees dedicated to managing such email. I think that they had ~300,000 customers. In terms of resources devoted to this task you might consider it $1 per customer per year. A very small portion of the cable Internet fees.

By: Russ Allbery

Russ Allbery — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 03:01:22 +0000

It would amaze me if any large organization read postmaster mail in any way that would lead them to respond to random complaints sent there in some kind of reliable fashion. I don’t know if you’ve ever read postmaster for a large site. If you haven’t, it’s hard to explain the sheer staggering quantity of crap that you’d have to sort through in order to find any sort of signal (and the most effective tools for personal e-mail, such as Bayesian filtering, are going to toss the reports of spam along with the spam since they, well, contain spam).

You’re talking about trying to find someone to sort through literally hundreds of thousands of messages a day, 99.99% of which are spam or junk from misconfigured mail systems.

There are two types of people handling postmaster mail for large sites: the people who ignore it, and the people who ignore it but haven’t admitted so yet. I at least *look* at it daily, but I’m sure that I miss all kinds of things that people think I should have seen and I don’t have time or resources to respond to the occasional random questions sent there.

By: Helmut

Helmut — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 11:58:59 +0000

Maybe you should rethink your usage scenario: Mail is to be used to communicate, not to punish people that are unable to set up a mail server. It sounds more like your mailbox is heavily broken, because your mx is not rfc-compliant (by rejecting mail based on invalid criteria). This is like privately punishing illegal activities with illegal activities: Don’t do that. Sorry, but r-o.o is crap.

By: Sven

Sven — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 07:35:52 +0000

Sorry Russel but using rfc-ignorant.org for anything more than a little bit of scoring is insane. I don’t know which r-o.o lists you use, and in which way, but e.g. the whois zone lists .de and some others completly. Sure that’s ok with the listing policy defined but that makes it rather useless using it for rejects in this case it’s even useless for scoring if you expect to receive a lot of mail from listed domains.
Other r-o.o lists are more usefull but using them for rejects is IMHO a great way to get yourself disconnect from the email using world. Suggesting to use one (web)mail provider as a workaround seems broken to me aswell. I don’t think that email should work this way, even today with all its problems.