Rob, First and foremost, I'm sorry. I did not mean to offend or frustrate you.
On 4/14/22 1:30 PM, Rob McEwen via mailop wrote:
MANY professionals in the business world (perhaps most of them?) - have the strong impression that a lack of a bounce message - on a hand-typed non-spam message - means that the message was delivered to the inbox. That's a hard reality regardless of what RFCs say.
I agree with this statement, but what it represents causes me indigestion. There are a number of reasons why a message will not make it to the Inbox /and/ the sender not receive a bounce message. -- There are some technical complications, e.g. systems breaking DSNs, and some non-technical / human reasons, e.g. questionable recipient side filters.
When more systems do this badly - it frustrates people and makes them hate email.
I understand and sympathize with them.
("RFCs this or that" - doesn't change this! And we can and should do better!)
Agreed.I don't know of any way to effect change / improvement with the parties that wantonly do things against the spirit of RFCs and / or what (end) users expect to happen.
In those situations where a message is spam filtered *after* the connection and the sender got a 250 OK response - AND - it was a hand typed not-spam false positives - the message being in the spam folder does NOT solve/fix/justify/resolve a number of bad things that harm people in this scenario. So yes, that it was in the spam folder *is* "besides the points" that I was made in my earlier post.
I feel like you and I are looking at things from two different levels. You seem to be looking at things from a higher service to end users level. Conversely I'm looking at things from a lower server to server transaction level. This seems particularly germane because something that is working as designed, as implemented, and as intended from the SMTP server to server transaction level can completely fail from the higher service to end users level.
You twisted my words so badly ...
I'm surprised by that response. I certainly did not mean to upset you. I apologize for upsetting you.
... that this doesn't deserve a response.
That is disappointing. Because I would actually like to discuss it further in the spirit of coming to an understanding of what each other meant, even if we continue to disagree with you.
I don't think that any reasonble person reading my original post - would have characterized what I said this manner
Well ... I /thought/ / think that I was / am a reasonable person and I did characterize what you said in that manner. So either I'm not as reasonable as I thought -- something that's possible -- or perhaps a reasonable person could characterize what you said in that manner.
it's a very inaccurate summary of what I said - almost offensively so.
I'm sorry for the inaccuracy of the summary. I definitely did not mean to offend you or anyone else.
Certain, reading your summary of what I said was FRUSTATING - almost like dealing with a Troll. Come'on Grant - you're better than this!
I promise that I did not do it to get a rouse out of you or anyone else.I genuinely thought that you were okay with filtering after the message is accepted in a limited capacity. -- If I may, I'd like to describe how I came to that conclusion. -- I say this in the spirit of hoping that you will help me understand how I failed so badly that I completely misinterpreted your statement.
Here's a copy of your statement for convenience: --8<--Also, while many mail hosters ALSO do this filtering technique, I consider this to /typically/ be an inferior spam filtering practice, although I'm open to the idea that doing it on a very limited basis might be OK (such as when an attachment has a /strong/ potential be a zero-day virus that anti-virus systems are not yet detecting... stuff like that).
-->8-- A simplified version thereof: --8<--...many mail hosters ... do this filtering technique, ... I'm open to the idea that doing it on a very limited basis might be OK....
-->8-- Which further simplifies to: --8<-- ... I'm open to the idea that doing it ... might be OK.... -->8--I then took the "might be OK" to mean that it is acceptable (in some situations) to filter after the message was accepted.
Even if you don't agree with my take away, which is certainly your prerogative, I hope you can see how I came to the simplification ~> statement that I did.
There is some Occam's Razor / Parsimony being applied that if you are okay with something on a very limited basis, you are okay with it some to be determined amount of time. Thus the question becomes one of how much time.
I fully acknowledge and agree that filtering after the message is accepted is an inferior spam filtering practice. -- However, being inferior doesn't in and of itself render the technique invalid.
Some very large providers do a much better job than Google. Google is just extremely determined to reduce labor costs as much as possible and squeeze as much profit as possible. Some other large email providers have a better balance between this and customer service and quality of service.) I can understand Google being like this for Gmail - but I'm reguarly hear first-hand examples of this from paying G-suite customers (or from their IT staff or vendor who was involved).
I'm glad to hear that other freemail providers do a better job than Google. I agree that Google should do better with G-suite customers than they do with Gmail customers.
Not accurate. For just 2 examples - while Microsoft's freemail system is NOT doing that great in this area either - but for just one example - I just did the math - and the number of gmail addresses hitting my spamtraps in the past 72 hours - is a 37-to-1 ratio of gmail spams vs Microsoft's freemail system (outlook/hotmail/etc). While Gmail has a larger system, it's not nearly 37 times larger. It's something like 4x or 5x larger. So that calculates to about a 700% increase in addresses used by spammers compared to total number of users - in comparision to Microsoft's freemail system. OUCH! So I don't buy this excuses for Google!
That is very interesting. Thank you for sharing it. It definitely calls into question my statement about large numbers being insufficient.
Then, when you compare the amount of spams sent from paid business hosting - spams from Google G-Suite - absolutely blows away spam sent from Proofpoint/Cloudmark - that's not even close - this is likely a larger ratio than 37-to-1 - and those are likely comparable sized systems. I don't have the exact numbers - but I'm confident that the number-of-outbound spams ratio per number of users (and per outbound legit email) sent from Google G-suite - far surpases this same *RATIO* for Proofpoint/Cloudmark. (Proofpoint/Cloudmark has somethink like 1 BILLION business mailboxes!)
:-/
Plus, at least for G-suite - their increased revenue - also negates much of that "but they're too big to do it" excuse.
I don't think anybody is too big to do spam filtering. I want to say that nobody is too small to do it either. Though there is probably some room for extremely small operators to fall off the bottom.
-- Grant. . . . unix || die
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