Re: [exim] SPAM Filtering - Losing the war!

Sometime around Tue, 24 Oct 2006 15:45:28 +0100, it may be that Chris
Lightfoot wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 24, 2006 at 03:41:45PM +0100, Mike Meredith wrote:
> > because they have an incompetent mail administrator is *not* a false
> > positive. It may well be decided that such a test causes too many
>
> any case where your spam filter blocks a mail that a user
> wanted to receive is a false positive.

From the user's perspective yes. Not from my perspective. And I've
already pointed out that whilst it may not be a false positive, if it
causes too many problems the test is too problematic and will be
removed.

What do I do in a situation where a user wants to receive all mail from
a problematic ISP whereas all my other 29999 users don't ? Ideally I
setup a block that applies for 29999 users and not for 1, if I can't
(possibly due to time restraints), the 1 user is disappointed.

On a separate point, my job (as a mail administrator ... I do other
stuff as well) is to provide an Internet mail service. By definition a
'mail server' with no rDNS isn't sending Internet mail ... it's just
random noise that happens to look like valid mail.

> If you ask your
> users, ``should I block email you want to receive because
> it came from a host which didn't have a reverse-DNS
> name?'', what would they say?

"What's DNS ?"


--
Mike Meredith, Senior Informatics Officer
University of Portsmouth: Hostmaster, Postmaster and Security
If you play the Windows CD backwards you hear a satanic message.
But it gets worse... If you play it forwards it installs Windows.