[91434] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: AOL Mail Problem
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (chuck goolsbee)
Thu Jul 27 12:29:00 2006
In-Reply-To: <9f2790160607270825v18463358w6e7b7abcfd13fa20@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2006 09:28:24 -0700
To: nanog@merit.edu
From: chuck goolsbee <chucklist@forest.net>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
>I managed to get a whitelist on the domains in
>question, which... unless you classify phpbb notifications as "spam"
>have never been even remotely associated with spamming.
The fatal flaw in AOL's feedback system is that it is user-generated,
and users will classify virtually anything as "spam". It is actually
quite entertaining to skim the scomp feed... ecommerce
confirmation/shipping notifications, mailing lists they subbed
themselves to, personal correspondence(!), etc. I have heard that the
AOL mail UI puts the "report as spam" button right next to the
"delete" button, which perhaps accounts for the error rate which (at
least in our case) exceeds 96%.
That said, we still find it exceedingly valuable. Once we were able
to build a filter-set to separate the wheat from the chaff (the
above-mentioned bozo-generated errors and forwarders), the feedback
loop actually performs as advertised & intended: It provides an extra
mallet in the "whack-a-mole" game of finding the exploited web forms,
compromised machines, etc.
AOL may have clueless users, but AOL's postmaster group has their
feces amalgamated. I wish I could say the same for Yahoo, Comcast,
MSN/Hotmail, etc etc. (ESPECIALLY Yahoo!)
--chuck goolsbee
digital.forest, seattle
