Re: best practices for fighting spam with Debian?
Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> wrote:
> On Thu 15 Dec 2016 at 10:41:58 +0100, Sven Hartge wrote:
> [..Snip...]
>> This seems all very complicated (it is), but because of the environment
>> I work in (University) it is very important for us (and our users) to
>> have more control over which email is rejected, trying to minimize false
>> positives as much as possible while also trying to detect as much SPAM
>> as possible. A very fine balance, to say the least.
> It is (as you say) complicated but
> 1. Why is it important for *your university*?
> 2. Why is it important for your users?
Our users (mostly professors) can sometimes be a bit ... particular
concerning mail reception and possible false positives.
This is why we built the whole filtering stuff mostly ourselves instead
of "outsourcing" it to a ready-made appliance. This would of course been
a much quicker path but you lose control of the inner workings this way.
Also the whole internal spam filtering harness has been built over the
last 15 years and at the beginning such filtering appliances where not
even a thing.
> The two are are not the same. For a start, users have no control over
> your mail server. Secondly, users might want to receive every mail they
> are sent, irrespective of what *you* think of its spamminess. After all,
> it is their mail, not yours. There is no "fine balance" as far as a
> user is concerned. Either they get the mail or they don't.
> Users can control what mail they receive, of course. Why not leave it
> up to them to decide?
This is why the filter is configurable by the user and the user may also
disable it completely, if s/he so choses. (Few do and many of those who
chose to disable it reenable it after a short while.)
There is a fine balance between protecting users from trojans, phishing
and virus infections on one side and allowing all legitimate mail on the
other side.
The filter setup for my own private mail server is much stricter than
that of my workplace, because I am the only user and can, for example,
reject whole countries because I personally only ever get spam from
there (looking at you China, Argentina and Brazil). This is of course
nothing I could enforce at work, obviously.
Grüße,
Sven.
--
Sigmentation fault. Core dumped.
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