Not concerned about FPS?

It's simply not a problem, in practice.


How do IMGate admins know they've got an FP problem

complaints


or their customers know that email from legitimate sources is
being blocked?

complaints


If FP's aren't a concern for IMGate then they should be

oh, really?


otherwise faith

"faith", how apropos.


in the email will plummet to a point where it's hardly
worth using as a serious business tool.

Why do you content-scanner lovers always trot out this "sky is falling!/wolf!/red herring" BS?


Do you really think the all the IMGate systems and admins are such total failures that their mail systems are "hardly worth using"?

What's even more concerning is this stance takes away power from the
recipient to decide what to do with their mail.

Depends in what religion you follow, since this is clearly a religious argument. What's different is that the envelope-rejector cult don't really care about converting the content-scanner true-believers, while the content-scanner true-believers have found The One True God which is of course better than every body else's God, who is then hyped as the Devil. Demon IMGate's links to Al Qaida are being investigated.


Religious point: content-scanners require 100% of all spam to be received/processed/stored. This "takes the power away from" the mail admin to keep this server-exhausting level of bandwidth/resource-consuming crap, typically 75% of all traffic, out of his system.

Do you administer a high-volume mail system?

Here's a Wednesday's IMGate report for a very satisfied IMGate single-criterion heathen who runs three IMGates as equal-preference MX. The report below is for one IMGate, only 1/3 of his traffic:

Grand Totals
------------
messages

 163796   received
  32001   delivered  <<<<<<<<<<<<<
      1   forwarded
    259   deferred  (745  deferrals)
    287   bounced
 169924   rejected (84%) <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
   7768   reject warnings
      0   held
      0   discarded (0%)

   1024m  bytes received
   1023m  bytes delivered  <<<<<<<<<<<<
  14935   senders
   4316   sending hosts/domains
  11927   recipients
   1584   recipient hosts/domains

smtpd

  169896   connections
   12931   hosts/domains
       6   avg. connect time (seconds)
 296:43:49  total connect time

Per-Hour Traffic Summary
    time          received  delivered   deferred    bounced     rejected
    --------------------------------------------------------------------
    0000-0100        6040        815         22          9       6816
    0100-0200        6846        786         37         12       8251
    0200-0300        6706        846         37         10       8489
    0300-0400        6029        650         20          3       7067
    0400-0500        5177        707         30          9       5737
    0500-0600        5463       1013         30         12       5715
    0600-0700        4944        795         33         13       5214
    0700-0800        5709       1211         36         10       5706
    0800-0900        6032       1649         46         11       5643
    0900-1000        7788       1665         30         14       8827
    1000-1100        7961       1796         37          5       8844
    1100-1200        7410       1767         41         16       7948
    1200-1300        7166       1768         42         21       7357
    1300-1400        7772       1687         44         15       8610
    1400-1500        8996       1632         27         22      10784
    1500-1600        9558       1616         33         14      10677
    1600-1700        8645       1735         33         12       9249
    1700-1800        7593       1389         21          5       8341
    1800-1900        7450       1373         25         16       8050
    1900-2000        6031       1280         24         16       6182
    2000-2100        6308       1585         24         15       6194
    2100-2200        5958       1611         34         13       5676
    2200-2300        4978       1357         26          7       4681
    2300-2400        7236       1268         13          7       7634

Here's the key point: those 32K deliveries are 1 GB of volume. Let's assume from those delivery numbers that the 160K single-criterion rejects (rejected after RCPT TO: so we never accepted the msg DATA, the reject has minimum cost) represent 5 GB of traffic.

What you're recommeding is that this IMGate admin would be much better off sucking in those 5 GB ( sanity check: x 3 = 15 GB, x 30 days = 450 GB, = 2 x T-1 lines dedicated to spam ) of traffic every day, do multi-criteria scanning and then flag every msg as "potential" spam, and then letting his 13K recipients, aka "empowered spam administrators" decide if it's really spam? I'm pretty sure his response would be in the tone of GMAFB.

Weight testing allows recipients to make their own judgement as to what is legitimate email as oppsoed to spam

IMGate admins are fully competent, and successful, to make their own judgement as to what they allow into their systems.


belocking system take that power away and puts it in the
hands of admins or worse automated systems. Users become more ignorant,
less well informed and reliant on sys admins.

Users do user stuff, admins do admin stuff. ( We recently heard here where a Postini ex-client said his users couldn't manage the admin to of the Postini web interface and per-user spam rules. )


Single point blocking can work

does work


but only in a very narrow range of circumstances.

Wrong. A single criterion is sufficient to reject huge volumes of crap. see above report.


But single criterion is so deliciously evil AND efficient, that's why we sinners over on the Dark Side love it so much.

Have you got a list of IMGate admins we could ask?

Join the IMGate list. Send in your inspectors. We have no WMFP, Weapons of Massive False Positives.


>2. how to report false positives
How do they know they get any unless the sender phones them

Wait! I suppose you are one of the quasi-admin users who are empowered to do their own desktop anti-spam admin? Don't you, and they, know how to use postmaster@ and abuse@ to report problems?


Defeats the object of email in the first place.

Nope. What defeats the object of email is having spam volume running at 50% to 90% of total mail volume. ( above, precisely 84% for Wednesday, 24 hours) Fighting THAT problem __as efficiently as possible__ is the first priority.


>3. how to opt out of all filtering
Which defeats the whole point anti-spam filtering - it's a all or
nothing scenario - no one wins.

IMGate admins go with the "all" scenario, it wins. You go with what works for you.


Len


_____________________________________________________________________ http://MenAndMice.com/DNS-training: London; San Jose; Wash DC IMGate.MEIway.com: anti-spam gateway, effective on 1000's of sites, free


To Unsubscribe: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html List Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/ Knowledge Base/FAQ: http://www.ipswitch.com/support/IMail/

Reply via email to