On 2012-09-04 at 11:31 +0200, Cyborg wrote:
> Am 04.09.2012 06:53, schrieb Phil Pennock:
> > Exim's not geared, as is, for large backlogs. With enough grunt, you
> > can overcome that, but it won't be as capable as a major email-pushing
> > engine.
> >
>
> And you only need that for spamming ( legal or illegal ). I.e. my last
> multidomain server park handelt 500k mails I/O a day
> per server with exim and it was enough. And i don't know how many we
> blocked per day , but it was massive :)
Spam is unsolicited, by its nature. If it's legal, it's probably not
spam, and calling it such is unnecessarily confrontational, which
doesn't lead to resolving problems peacefully to the benefit of the
people reading the mail, who are the folks that matter the most.
If you have a production site which can generate _notification_ emails,
which are fully under the control of the user, then that is solicited.
Each mail is different, each is wanted.
There's clear white mail in volume, such as notifications from Github.
Then there are social sites which send a few types of mail; some are
definitely wanted (notifications of replies, new followers, all
controllable) and some are more dubious ("hey, you've been absent! Come
back, we're great!").
I view legitimate mail as falling into a few categories:
(1) direct personal mail
(2) mailing-list mail, which has been subscribed to, where each message
has been generated by a human, occasionally including a spam
message, which doesn't mean the list itself is spam, just that it's
sometimes abused as a vector
(3) transactional emails, which act as a notification; this could be a
purchase receipt, a push notification, a social media action
(3.1) transactional emails, via a mailing-list, such as a "commits"
mailing-list. An example of this is <exim-cvs@???>, which
exemplifies both the concept and the problem when a particular
technology is embedded in the name, since all messages to that
list come from git, not CVS.
(4) Reserved, because the above may not be complete and I do not
authorise citing it to smack down a party to a conversation.
The simple act of sending large quantities of mail does not make a site
a spammer. It's cause to pause and check cautiously to investigate, and
I fully understand why many folks will decline to answer questions on a
list where folks ask for help doing it. After all, the sites sending a
large quantity of mail legitimately tend to do things like spend enough
money to hire expert postmasters to set things up and work with
receiving sites to resolve problems and leave folks happy that they're
not a spam source.
-Phil
