[H-GEN] I was sittin' and wondering'

[Greg Black]

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Robert Brockway wrote:

| On Mon, 4 Nov 2002, Greg Black wrote:
| [...]
| It is for these reasons that I recommend that large organisations maintain
| their own backup MX which is physically & network-wise seperate from the
| primary.

I don't really disagree with this advice, although I no longer
follow it.  But the original question appeared to be from
somebody who was looking after a small network and for whom this
would not have been an option.

| > One good reason for not
| > using a backup MX, especially if it's not one you fully control,
| > is that you lose the ability to block spam -- block it at your
| > primary and it gets delivered to your secondary which then
| > delivers it to you.  Since you cannot correctly refuse to accept
| > delivery from your secondary, you're hosed.
| 
| It does depend on how you approach the problem of Spam.  From this contaxt
| & from previous things Greg has said, I believe he blocks port 25
| connections from known spam hosts - perhaps by using the RBL or something
| like that.  In this case a secondary would indeed end up relaying the
| spam back to you (very annoying).

Yes, I do block port 25 connections from hosts that I believe to
be spammers -- partly from various black lists and partly from
my own personal spam collection.

| I use SpamAssassin.  [...]

I keep thinking about using SpamAssassin and will probably get
around to it one of these days.  But, because I don't think it's
the right solution, I would prefer not to use it as a primary
defence against the evil empire.

I think it's the wrong solution because, as Rob pointed out, it
means that the bottom-feeders get to deliver their junk to me,
at my expense.  Although the dollar cost to me is insignificant
at this time, the principle of paying for spam does not sit well
with me at all.

| I prefer this slightly greater cost overhead in order to avoid
| losing any mail that might have been incorrectly tagged as spam.

I'm happy to lose anything that looks like spam.  I don't read
half the real email I get now -- anything that is poorly set
out, ugly, hard to read, top-posted, filled with excessive
quoted matter or quoted matter that ended up a mess, or in the
form of HTML or Word documents generally ends up in the bit
bucket without a second glance, even if it's from my mother.

Stuff that looks like spam after about 150 milliseconds of
examination ends up in a spam store which I *never* review with
my own eyes -- sometimes I run scripts to extract statistics
from the spam archive for various purposes including adding
addresses to my block list.

| As can be seen, opinions differ on what is the correct way to approach the
| problem, and in the end it really does depend on what you want to get out
| of your mail system.

Here we're in complete agreement.

| If I'm considering sending an
| unencrypted mail I don't send it unless I'm happy for the contents to turn
| up on the front page of the Courier Mail.

I'd go one step further -- I don't even trust encrypted mail not
to end up in the wrong place unless I am the sole recipient.

Greg

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