Hi All. I have been absent on the list so far, and I wanted to wade in and give you guys some updates and some background on where we are at:
(BTW, I am Kim Phelan, the director of product management, and also the acting product manager of Email Defense) I am sure you have all read Elliot's note about how we got to this place with Email Defense. I echo his sentiments, this launch has been a nightmare, and we are trying to clean up the mess we made as fast as we can. A couple of administrative notes before I talk about spam filtering: 1- All real time updates will be done via status.tucows.com- at minimum these will be done 2 times a day, more if there are more updates 2- If you are seeing a problem, please log a ticket with support, and the more specific examples the better 3- Our entire team is working this weekend to fix problems, and to answer your support requests, and to keep you updated Onto some background stuff: First off, I wanted to update you with what we do when we filter. We filter things 3 times: 1- RBLs- we use RBLs from Spamhaus and augmented by our abuse team and every message is checked against this list before it is even accepted by the system- this stops a boat-load of spammers. We did use RBLs with MXLogic, but it was not as efficient as this implementation is. 2- Then, we check standard email format checks- these are things like "do we get a helo?, is there angled brackets around the sender/ recipients?, are the domains they are sending from valid ?"etc. This removes more there. 3- Then, we filter using our spam filter engine. When we were preparing for this launch, we ran side by side MXL, Mailshell (which is our new filter engine) and Brightmail. Mailshell did very well. It was on par or better than both those vendors on average. Now, I say on average, because it's like an arms race, one day brightmail updates their filters, the next day it's mailshell etc. The one thing we were really winning at was false positives-- aka: newsletters that people opted in for. MXL stank at recognizing that stuff, Mailshell is pretty good at it. (side admin note: if you have a missed spam, or a false positive, please send it, with full headers to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and they'll make sure it gets fed into the filtering improvement side of the house) Next topic: current issues, the low-down on the open issues, and where we are at. Kim Kim Phelan Director, Product Management Tucows Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] 416-538-5476 On 8-Mar-07, at 4:13 PM, Chris Scott wrote: > Brian Curtis wrote: >> Hello, > > <snip> > >> On to the issues I attempted to address with my phone call. >> >> 1) We're seeing an increase in UCBE that is bypassing the EDS system >> altogether. I realize that this is indeed a possibility as one only >> needs to use the final destination MX record. However, as I >> mentioned >> above, we've been using EDS since it's availability from Tucows, and >> prior to that we were on a test platform directly with MX Logic >> for at >> least two months. > > Same thing here and also reported by our customers. Even worse is > that > they see *less* spam being quarantined than before and are worried > messages are being lost and/or rejected. > > At first, we thought this was due to the migration setting all domains > to deny high likelihood spam. But even after we went through each > domain and set them to quarantine we're not seeing much change. > >> I don't understand why there would be an increase in UCBE that is >> being delivered directly. We have not made any changes to our MX >> record in some time, and the only record listed for our domains with >> EDS is that of the EDS system. Also, the increase of direct delivery >> UCBE seems to coincide with the migration to the Tucows-provided >> platform. > > One thing I've noticed is that many actual opt-in newsletters that > were > being quarantined before are now being delivered. For some of our > domains, this is a noticeable source of the increase. Unfortunately, > there is still more spam getting through than before. Even worse, > much > of that which gets through would be handled by two simple tests: > making > sure the sending server HELOs as a hostname and checking against a > DNSBL > that lists dynamic addresses. > >> >> 2) Much of the UCBE that is going through the EDS system, but not >> being tagged as spam, is marked with a spam score of 2. I'd have to >> say at least 20-25% of the UCBE let through the EDS system has this >> exact spam score value. >> >> None of these messages show any similarities. > > I thought it was just me that noticed this... Even a few Tucows > communications have had a score of 2. > >> 3) Will attachment filtering be added back into the product? Many of >> our customers appreciated this feature and put it to good use in the >> past. Needless to say, it's one of the first questions I'm asked >> when >> one of our customers call about the new system. >> >> >> I've been pursuing alterative / competitive services. So far the >> only >> hold-back is the feature to price ratio of the product provided by >> Tucows. However, we're starting to ask ourselves if all the problems >> that have been occurring and the calls we continue to handle as a >> result (for the better part of a week now) are worth the price >> difference in the end. > > If you're not set on a hosted service and want to run it yourself, > check > out Can-It from Roaring Penguin. > > > -- > Chris Scott > Adaptive Hosting Solutions, Inc. | Blogzerk - blog hosting > http://www.adaptivehostingsolutions.com/ | http://www.blogzerk.com/ > _______________________________________________ > domains-gen mailing list > [email protected] > http://discuss.tucows.com/mailman/listinfo/domains-gen Kim Phelan Director, Product Management Tucows Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] 416-538-5476 _______________________________________________ domains-gen mailing list [email protected] http://discuss.tucows.com/mailman/listinfo/domains-gen
