Re: SPAM fighting is a thankless job!

> End-user filters certainly don't save you bandwidth or storage space in
> your in-box, but they can keep it away from invading your eyeball space.

True, and that is my main problem right now. If I let the SPAM even hit my server, it fills my space quota within a few minutes and the show is over. I just can't justify paying for more space just to accomodate the spammers.

> Another suggestion if you're a small domain owner, but registered at
> GoDaddy, is to use them as your mail forwarding service, and their
> aggressive filters will take care of a lot of the spam before it has to
> bounce off your own filters.

A business friend uses GoDaddy's spam service, and hates it because he has no control over it; can't even whitelist anyone. Granted, I don't use it myself, so I'm taking his word for that. And he did confirm their filtering is quite aggressive.

> Depends on your definition of unreliable, but corporate solutions usually
> need to err on the side of less-aggressive filtering if the cost of a
> false positive is high.

Agreed.

> I see very little downside in that, but my needs are different than many
> corporations. If they can't configure DNS or their mail servers properly,
> I might see very little need to get their email. And my bounce message
> would say so. :-)

Also agreed, but you'd be surprised how many don't know what they are doing (well, maybe you wouldn't be surprised). At the company I work for, we deal with a lot of small medical offices who think they can do everything on their own to save money. Unfortunately, we can't reject their email just because they aren't savvy in the computer department. It's a catch-22.

> Your business partners could have whitelisted you, but you had faulty
> processes in place if a new server was allowed to go live without being
> checked first. I do sympathize for you - and assume the employee was
> chastized and new checks and balances put in place.

Oh, believe me, I went nutso over that one! The ironic part is, the server was built by a 3rd party vendor (so-called experts) because management decided we were too busy to build another email server on our own. The new employee simply stood it up in the data center. However, a more experienced employee would have checked such things before putting it on the network.

> Fascinated. Thanks!

You definitely sound like you know what you are doing, and I appreciate the conversation. I'm still going to check out the software to see how it fares. If I can get my spam problem under control, I'd rather keep Mauder.com online and do some good with it.

Thank You!