[84807] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: 209.68.1.140 (209.68.1.0 /24) blocked by bellsouth.net for SMTP
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sean Figgins)
Sun Sep 25 23:42:48 2005
Date: Sun, 25 Sep 2005 21:40:43 -0600 (MDT)
From: Sean Figgins <sean@labrats.us>
To: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <bb0e440a05092520285ad1d36f@mail.gmail.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
On Mon, 26 Sep 2005, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
> regular email forwarding IF you filter first
And if the customer specifically requests that YOU do not filter his
email, or set up a system that allows him to see ALL email, even if ti is
tagged as spam?
Personally, I feel that at some point, filtering email becomes a violation
of the provider's obligation to provide the customer a service. Spam
filtering should be opt-in only by the customer, and not forced on the
customer with no way to opt out.
If your customer depends on his email for business, and your automated
system rejects a valid email due to a false positive, the results can have
a devistating effect on your customer's business.
Now, I have heard the arguements, such as a customer should not use a
private account to conduct business, or business should not be conducted
through email, or that allow spam in forces a hardship on the service
provider, and they may all be very true, but it does not change the truth
that a single false positive can ruin a business.
I tried many different ways to filter spam, and honestly, I could find no
system that did not create false positives, so I removed all server-based
spam measures from my servers that are not strictly opt-in, and allows the
customers to review all messages not immediately released into their
inbox. This is probably not practical for a company like Bell South, or
AOL, or anyone that has millions of email customers, but works for me.
-Sean
