[78718] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: sorbs.net
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Suresh Ramasubramanian)
Mon Mar 21 23:05:43 2005
Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2005 09:35:02 +0530
From: Suresh Ramasubramanian <ops.lists@gmail.com>
Reply-To: Suresh Ramasubramanian <ops.lists@gmail.com>
To: "Jay R. Ashworth" <jra@baylink.com>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <20050321105800.E27423@cgi.jachomes.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
On Mon, 21 Mar 2005 10:58:00 -0500, Jay R. Ashworth <jra@baylink.com> wrote:
>
> This sounds like an excellent sales point for value added mail
> processing...
>
It is not just clueless end user exchange admins who deploy dumb filter rules.
If I had a nickel for every time I've run into stupid spam filtering
(read: filtering that affects mail from my over 40 million users,
because an admin was too dumb to read forged headers) at surprisingly
large operators [ISPs, huge corporate networks etc] I'd be rich.
Luckily, quite a few people who turn on dumb spam filters do turn them
off when contacted and told about their bad filtering. Some make the
mistake of not doing so - and they'll be destined to lose email for
their users, on a permanent basis.
Its that old Spiderman quote - With great power comes great
responsibility. Having root / enable / postmaster access at a site
means its not enough to know how to do "access list 101 deny" or "vi
/etc/mail/access" .. it means that the guy should know when to do it -
and when not to. And he should be reachable, and should know enough
to realize he's screwed up, and to fix it. Sadly, this is rather less
common than simply knowing how to throw filters in - that's the easy
part. Kind of like the difference between a mining engineer
triggering carefully shaped and placed demolition charges, and Wile E
Coyote lighting the fuse on a bundle of dynamite.
--
Suresh Ramasubramanian (ops.lists@gmail.com)
