Len, Thank you for your very timely and straight-forward comments, ie: "It's impossible to protect people from their own ignorance."
This was recently shoved down my throat by a not-for-profit client who attempted to blame us (as their hosting provider) for a 40% downturn in their donations after we implemented spam filtering. In an attempt to placate him, we sent every spam item containing an address for their agency that was captured by the anti-spam filters to a special account for him to review. This resulted in several hundred messages per day. The missing e-mails he was not receiving were allegedly coming from his accountant firm who was in the process of doing an annual audit of the agency. We did an investigation and found the accounting firm's service provider had recently been purchased by a national provider who had not purchased all of the servers. Half of the e-mail servers were now located at and owned by a new company, and half were sitting in an office, managed by no one, still connected to the net, and still processing e-mail (this information was given to us after almost a month of investigation on the part of many parties). E-mail, both originating at the clients of the company that had been purchased, and being sent to clients of that company, was being routed to BOTH sets of e-mail servers both those that had been purchased reconfigured and those that were sitting in an unused and unmanaged office which were still being listed in the DNS records even though those records had been "updated" by someone at the company that had purchased the provider. The e-mail in the unmanaged office was being collected and never delivered - whether it was inbound or outbound - just filling up the server and sitting there. In spite of all the work we put into working with the not-for-profit client; in spite of the fact that we proved that the non-receipt of the lost e-mail was not our problem; the client changed providers. In addition to now receiving several hundred additional spam messages per day, they are still not receiving all of their e-mail they perceive they should be receiving. They are now paying 3 times what we were charging them for the service and are limited, by the contract with their latest service provider to sending and receiving a total of 300 messages per day (a real crimp for an agency that sends out a newsletter with more than 4,000 members on their newsletter list). My point is this: no matter how hard we try, we are not going to please all subscribers all the time. Sometimes we just have to say "goodbye", let them go elsewhere and find out that the internet and e-mail are not a perfect medium - that everything is a balanced trade-off and nothing is guaranteed. In this case, based solely on the fact that we had an existing relationship with several of the staff members, we also let them know that they "can have their old room back if they knock on the door". Unfortunately, in this case, the self-importance and ignorance of one individual at the not-for-profit has damaged a friendship that spans more than 20 years with several of the employees. This was one situation where no matter how much time we put into assisting them in the resolve of the matter, no matter how much proof we presented, no matter how much we attempted to make things right, the individual who had the authority to make decisions had pre-determined that we were wrong. Since they left our hosting services, they have gone thru 3 service providers in their search for the perfect e-mail grail. Bruce Barnes ChicagoNetTech Inc 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/
