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Re: Which Spam Block List to use for a network?



On Wednesday 30 June 2004 15.54, Robert Cates wrote:
> Hi,
>
> why don't you make life easier for yourself and forget trying to
> block Spam! Let your customers and/or users be responsible for
> blocking Spam!  [...]

Apart from what Russel says: are you prepared to pay for it?

According to some (IIRC AOL published numbers like that) email blocked 
in the SMTP transaction reaches 80-90% of the mail delivery attempts in 
some cases (I have ca. 50%, I guess mainly because my domain is 
insignificant enough not to attract systematic dictionary attacks etc.)

So, are you prepared to pay for
 - the additional storage used to store all the mail
 - the additional support personnel to answer phones when customers are 
annoyed that their mail quota is full again
 - the additional bandwidth used to transfer all that spam to the 
customers
 - the additional time spent by all customers (instead of just once by 
the ISP) to configure an anti-spam set up that will in 80% of the cases 
filter out all of the same messages for everybody

(not to mention that such a set up has less information available, like 
crossassassin-style detection of the same message being delivered to 
many accounts, which is quite a good spam-sign in many cases).

Lacking experience with large set ups, this is not hard data, but I'm 
quite confident that those who *have* experience with large set ups can 
confirm these thoughts.


I agree that false positives are extremely annoying, so an ISP/corporate 
anti-spam policy will have to be more conservative than what some here 
use for their own email.

cheers
-- vbi

-- 
Beware of the FUD - know your enemies. This week
    * The Alexis de Toqueville Institue *
http://fortytwo.ch/opinion/

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