Craig White wrote:
On Fri, 2008-04-11 at 16:16 -0700, Les wrote:
On Fri, 2008-03-28 at 11:06 -0700, Craig White wrote:
On Fri, 2008-03-28 at 10:17 -0700, Les wrote:
On Fri, 2008-03-28 at 09:35 -0700, Craig White wrote:
On Fri, 2008-03-28 at 08:29 -0700, Les wrote:
But is 99.99% delivery sufficient? I receive more than 150 emails per
day (ones that I am interested in), and every few days I need to receive
certain emails about customer relations and ongoing projects. 99.99
percent means I would miss one every 66 days. If the one that I miss
cost me a contract, it might not matter whether I received the rest or
not. Currently I have to parse through the junk mail locally and
remotely about once a week. the ISP junk folder often has more than
1200 emails in it. THe local one about 30. This adds about 1/2 day of
overhead every week to recapture what should have come through.
Personally I think the world needs to eliminate spam, or at least make
every effort to seriously reduce it.
----
but your example completely misses the point.
the 'Junk' directory is a result of some type of agent parsing accepted
e-mail, scoring it and redirecting it based on a score.
The point of greylisting is always about (or virtually always...depends
upon various implementations anyway) sender/recipient/smtp server
'tuples' and 'Temporary Failure' /SMTP result codes 450 and whether the
sender attempts redelivery.
http://www.greylisting.org/
I would suggest that rather than prove the argument about the problems
with greylisting, you have proven the opposite because if you can lop
approximately 70% of that junk mail off the top via greylisting, you
wouldn't have to look through so much 'junk' to find the false positives
that inevitably occur with any type of spam scoring system.
Craig
I cannot argue the value of greylisting. But efficiency is in the eye
of the beholder. My time is limited. My work valuable, and my customer
correspondence is dictated by my customer, not my email policy. I am at
the mercy of the ISP here, and the customer. Yet I am the one who
suffers loss, not the ISP, not the customer who will find someone to do
his work. Yet you as the web person thinks this is effective. I cannot
speak to school systems, only professional uses. Time is money and lost
opportunity is even more valuable, resulting in loss that cannot be
measured, yet ultimately may determine the success or failure of my
business.
I would like to take this thought "out of the box". The methods
currently in place, grey listing, parsing for key words, and other
simplistic means, while effective at reducing traffic are not really the
desired solution by users, who would like 100% success in getting their
desired email. And while I cannot spout statistics about loss, I know
it happens from personal experience. The question at hand is how to
avoid even more loss. It is a quality issue, and today the quality
standard is not 99.99%, it is 99.9999% (six nines or six sigma) in most
industries. To say that 99.99 is good enough is the path for GM and
Ford, not Toyota and Nissan. Think of it that way. So how do we
improve by two decades of quality in this "war" against spam?
----
greylisting is just one of a lot of tools available to the mail server
administrator - all of them are calibrated to minimize the junk mail
delivered to the end users and of course minimizing delivery failures
and false positive scoring by various mechanisms.
End users of course are the ones ultimately affected and you seemingly
want to open an end user discussion about a server level
technology...please don't as it won't provide clarity to anyone.
If you are losing e-mails, evaluate the filtering system that you use at
end user level and discuss the methodologies employed by your mail
provider with them.
This is the same sort of nonsense that the carmakers spouted about
quality in the 70's. See where it got them.
This is an end user product. Clarity is the way the user sees it, not
the way the provider sees it.
I know there is no sense arguing this, I have dealt with engineers and
quality issues for years. The only way that attention comes is when
someone provides the user with higher quality and the engineer is
provided with a pink slip when his job goes away.
It is coming. Wait for it... wait for it....
----
aside from your resurrecting a discussion that is 2 weeks old and
completely cold...
aside from your continued insistence to inject user level concerns on a
topic that was completely about SMTP/MTA administration...
aside from the fact that you have now tried to render a technical
discussion on strategic mail handling to a metaphor that has no
relevance...
I'd say you have contributed nothing to the discourse at all.
I will repeat...you are in control over your own e-mail.
If you don't like how your e-mail provider handles your e-mail, you can
change providers.
My comments on this topic were directly solely to a system administrator
handling a mail account that was job jobbed. How did this concern you? I
still have no idea.
Craig
Question. Could not the request for a return receipt solve all of this?
Max
