No, what will happen more and more is that parties who forward email
will have to make a "best effort" to ensure that it is not spam.
Meaning a policy "unfiltered email does not get fowarded to external
parties"
This was my point. Have we already come to the day where regular e-mail
forwarding is no longer workable? If so, we'll adapt, naturally, but I
didn't think that day had come yet. And I didn't think Bellsouth would be
leading the way.
This is a problem. Headers would go a long way to disabling the
forwarding instances and/or mandating strict filtering for those customers.
That being said, assuming you have told bellsouth you were working on
eliminating raw forwarding they should have worked immediately to lift
the block and give you the benefit of the doubt.
Bellsouth hasn't even said they want forwarding eliminated or filtered;
they are just being obstinate and unhelpful.
i'm not advocating spf, mind .. though that WAS started to address
forwarded spam, initially, before it changed specs, utilities and
various other things
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.
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?
Then you simply tell the customer to collect (via pop, imap, etc.) the email directly from your mail servers. Your position is that you are unable to provide the service of an unfiltered forwarded address due to the problems this causes all the *other* customers on your network when the recipient clicks "this is spam" in the final mailbox on email that was forwarded thru your network, labeling your network as a "source" of the forwarded spam.
It is impossible to give every customer *everything* they ask for. You should give them as much as you *reasonably* can, but unreasonable request must be met with "no" or else you will end up catering to a bunch of side cases and ignoring your core business, ultimately to the detriment of the majority of your customers.
jc
p.s. Speaking of "unreasonable requests" - I feel it is unreasonable for a member of the moderating committee to whine that he can't filter out "undesired" posts due to using a lame email client, and to then coerce a poster into "tagging" these posts. I laud the poster for being willing to tag anyway, but think it's a very bad precedent that "tag because I'm using a lame email client and I'm on the moderating committee so you need to cater to my whims" is allowed to prevail. I thought this was supposed to be a group of highly technical people who are expected to do whatever filtering is necessary on their own end...
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?
sell the customer a colo box or a virtual private server and have him
do whatever he wants with it
commodity / customer mailserver operations do involve filtering
provider, and they may all be very true, but it does not change the truth
that a single false positive can ruin a business.
If you filter spam, return clear bounce messages that show why the
filtering was done. Ideally return a url in the bounce message that
links to a clear explanation + tells you what to do about it. And a
response mechanism to handle false positive reports, that addresses
these ASAP.
Bad spam filtering is what gives all filtering a bad name ... what I
would call the Wile E Coyote school of spam filtering. Like a trained
mining engineer can use a fused bundle of dynamite to blow a hole in a
rock - he'll blow up just what he wants to blow up, nothing else.
Give Wile E Coyote that dynamite and ask him to blow up the roadrunner
.. you know what happens next.
I'm aware of quite a few people who have encouraged said poster to tag his
off-topic posts for easy filtering, myself included. Ideally this material
belongs in a blog with a comments section, or in a seperate mailing list.
Failing that, it needs to be tagged for easy filtering by those who aren't
interested.
Given the number of times this has come up for discussion, and the number
of people who have expressed dissatisfaction with these posts (without
even making any guesses as to which are in the majority and which are in
the minority), I don't think asking for them to be well-tagged is an
unreasonable request, no matter how possible it may be to match them via
another header if you ran a different mail client. Adding a subject tag
also allows readers to match on the off-topic chatter spawned by these
posts, not just the original post.
So far all we've accomplished with this debate is proving that there are
interested parties on both sides. I really don't think anyone has been
directly "against" the content in question, we just don't want this
operational and technical mailing list for network operations being taken
over by news and general technology chatter. My stance is that everything
has its place, and this material should be given its own. While I agree
that yes it is technically possible for every person who isn't interested
in this material to configure and maintain their own filters (and hit
delete a lot), it seems like just having those who ARE interested
subscribe to a new list or RSS feed to get it is easier.
Please, can't we just solve this with a little sanity, and stop these back
and forth pissing match threads and off-topic posts?
I'm aware of quite a few people who have encouraged said poster to tag his off-topic posts for easy filtering, myself included.
A brief cite and quote from a news article discussing the status of major networks (BellSouth Corp., SBC Communications, Cingular Wireless) in North America following a huge storm that affected several states is clearly on-topic for the North American Network Operators Group discussion list.
Ideally this material belongs in a blog with a comments section,
He has a blog. He posts *many* more links to his blog each day than he posts to nanog. Since creating his blog, the links he posts to nanog are, for the most part, on-topic for nanog. Certainly the post that triggered this discussion was on-topic for nanog.
or in a seperate mailing list. Failing that, it needs to be tagged for easy filtering by those who aren't interested.
I'm confused. Can you explain why the ON-TOPIC links he posts somehow "need to be tagged"?
Adding a subject tag also allows readers to match on the off-topic chatter spawned by these posts, not just the original post.
Why is this any different from the off-topic chatter spawned from other posts?
Please, can't we just solve this with a little sanity, and stop these back and forth pissing match threads and off-topic posts?
I honestly believe that the issue of the TAGS is secondary and once again this list is dragged into a long unrelated thread. I feel that Paul got fed up with how things are - as far as I understand it.
The attitude, the ugly chatter and the hypocracy.
Maybe we should do some statistical analysis and see who the one person who starts most of these pi??ing contests, as you call them, is? The results may be interesting.